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EVEN IN THE BEST-CASE SCENARIO L2 LEARNERS HAVE PERSISTENT DIFFICULTY PERCEIVING AND UTILIZING TONES IN MANDARIN

FINDINGS FROM BEHAVIORAL AND EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS EXPERIMENTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2020

Eric Pelzl Open the ORCID record for Eric Pelzl [Opens in a new window] ,
Ellen F. Lau ,
Taomei Guo  and
Robert DeKeyser
Eric Pelzl*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park and The Pennsylvania State University
Ellen F. Lau*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
Taomei Guo*
Affiliation:
Beijing Normal University
Robert DeKeyser*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Eric Pelzl, 111 Moore Building, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA16802-6203. E-mail: ezp218@psu.edu
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Abstract

Lexical tones are widely believed to be a formidable learning challenge for adult speakers of nontonal languages. While difficulties—as well as rapid improvements—are well documented for beginning second language (L2) learners, research with more advanced learners is needed to understand how tone perception difficulties impact word recognition once learners have a substantial vocabulary. The present study narrows in on difficulties suggested in previous work, which found a dissociation in advanced L2 learners between highly accurate tone identification and largely inaccurate lexical decision for tone words. We investigate a “best-case scenario” for advanced L2 tone word processing by testing performance in nearly ideal listening conditions—with words spoken clearly and in isolation. Under such conditions, do learners still have difficulty in lexical decision for tone words? If so, is it driven by the quality of lexical representations or by L2 processing routines? Advanced L2 and native Chinese listeners made lexical decisions while an electroencephalogram was recorded. Nonwords had a first syllable with either a vowel or tone that differed from that of a common disyllabic word. As a group, L2 learners performed less accurately when tones were manipulated than when vowels were manipulated. Subsequent analyses showed that this was the case even in the subset of items for which learners showed correct and confident tone identification in an offline written vocabulary test. Event-related potential results indicated N400 effects for both nonword conditions in L1, but only vowel N400 effects in L2, with tone responses intermediate between those of real words and vowel nonwords. These results are evidence of the persistent difficulty most L2 learners have in using tones for online word recognition, and indicate it is driven by a confluence of factors related to both L2 lexical representations and processing routines. We suggest that this tone nonword difficulty has real-world implications for learners: It may result in many toneless word representations in their mental lexicons, and is likely to affect the efficiency with which they can learn new tone words.

Keywords

ChineseERPstonesL2lexical processing
Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 268 - 296
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Thanks to Mo Chen, Shuhua Li, Zhaoqi Zhang, Zhang Liang, Junjie Wu, Yongben Fu, and Chunyan Kang for help running participants, problem shooting MATLAB, and introducing good food in Beijing. Thanks also to Seth Wiener and an anonymous reviewer for their generous and helpful feedback. This research was supported in part by NSF- IGERT grant 0801465 and Ling-DDRI grant 1728851.

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