Categorical Perception of Tone 2 and Tone 3 of Standard Chinese by Bilingual Korean Ethnic Speakers in China

This study looks into the categorical perception of the tonal contrast of Tone 2 (T2) and Tone 3 (T3) of Standard Chinese by bilingual Korean ethnic speakers as compared with age-matched monolingual Mandarin speakers. Disyllabic words were designed to examine the identification and discrimination of re-synthesized target syllables in onset and tail positions with three context tones. The results show that bilingual Korean ethnic speakers manifest rather similar categoricalness in perceiving the tonal contrast as their Mandarin counterparts. Unexpectedly, Korean ethnic speakers have finer perceptual sensitivity than their Mandarin counterparts in some scenarios. Korean ethnic speakers also tend to use the phonatory feature associated with T3 in perceiving the tonal contrast, but this cue is less salient in tone perception. The findings indicate that sufficient exposure to Mandarin Chinese may shape the categorical perception of the tonal contrasts for speakers with non-tonal language backgrounds.