Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 2025
Cantonese Tone Perception by Punjabi Speakers of Cantonese: Evidence and Implications for the Perceptual Assimilation Model of Second Language Speech Learning
This study tested whether the Perceptual Assimilation Model of Second Language Speech Learning (PAM-L2) predicts second language (L2) Cantonese tone discrimination across different perceptual modes. Punjabi speakers of Cantonese completed the Cantonese tone assimilation and discrimination tasks. In the assimilation task, the Punjabi listeners assimilated the Cantonese tones as two-category (TC), single-category (SC), uncategorized-categorized without overlap (UC-no), and uncategorized-categorized with partial overlap (UC-po) pairs, yielding testable predictions for PAM-L2 in the discrimination task (TC = UC-no > UC-po > SC). In the discrimination task, the model-driven predictions were largely supported in the double-talker context but not in the single-talker and pure tone contexts. These results suggest that PAM-L2 applies to phonological but not non-phonological discrimination of L2 tones. Moreover, our findings indicate that the distinction between partial and complete overlap may not be necessary for UC pairs.
AndrianopoulosM. V.DarrowK.ChenJ. (2001). Multimodal standardization of voice among four multicultural populations formant structures. Journal of Voice, 15(1), 61–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0892-1997(01)00007-8
2.
AntoniouM.TylerM. D.BestC. T. (2012). Two ways to listen: Do L2-dominant bilinguals perceive stop voicing according to language mode?Journal of Phonetics, 40(4), 582–594. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2012.05.005
3.
Baese-BerkM. M.ChandrasekaranB.RoarkC. L. (2022). The nature of non-native speech sound representations. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(5), 3025–3034. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0015230
4.
BaileyT. G. (1919). English—Panjabi dictionary. Ess Publications.
5.
BarriusoT. A.Hayes-HarbR. (2018). High variability phonetic training as a bridge from research to practice. The CATESOL Journal, 30(1). https://doi.org/10.5070/b5.35970
6.
BatesD.MachlerM.BolkerB.WalkerS. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01
7.
BestC. T. (1994). The emergence of native-language phonological influences in infants: A perceptual assimilation model. In GoodmanJ. C.NusbaumH. C. (Eds.), The development of speech perception: The transition from speech sounds to spoken words (pp. 167–224). The MIT Press.
8.
BestC. T. (1995). A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception. In StrangeW. (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 171–206). York Press.
9.
BestC. T.McRobertsG. W.GoodellE. (2001). Discrimination of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimilation to the listener’s native phonological system. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109(2), 775–794. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1332378
10.
BestC. T.TylerM. D. (2007). Non-native and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities. In BohnO-S.MunroM. (Eds.), Language experience in second language speech learning: In honour of James Emil Flege (pp. 13–34). John Benjamins.
11.
BurnhamD.KasisopaB.ReidA.LuksaneeyanawinS.LacerdaF.AttinaV.RattanasoneN. X.SchwarzI.-C.WebsterD. (2015). Universality and language-specific experience in the perception of lexical tone and pitch. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36(6), 1459–1491. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716414000496
ChaoY. R. (1930). A system of tone letters. Le Maître Phonétique, 45, 24–27.
16.
ChenJ.BestC. T.AntoniouM.KasisopaB. (2019). Cognitive factors in perception of Thai tones by naïve Mandarin listeners. In CalhounS.EscuderoP.TabainM.WarrenP. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th international congress of phonetic sciences (pp. 1684–1688). Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
17.
ChenJ. Q.AntoniouM.BestC. T. (2023). Phonological and phonetic contributions to perception of non-native lexical tones by tone language listeners: Effects of memory load and stimulus variability. Journal of Phonetics, 96, 101199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101199
18.
ChoiW. (2020). The selectivity of musical advantage: Musicians exhibit perceptual advantage for some but not all Cantonese tones. Music Perception, 37(5), 423–434. https://doi.org/10.1525/Mp.2020.37.5.423
19.
ChoiW. (2022). Theorizing positive transfer in cross-linguistic speech perception: The Acoustic-attentional-contextual hypothesis. Journal of Phonetics, 91, 101135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101135
20.
ChoiW.ChanL. Y. (2025). The comparative effects of Cantonese and Mandarin tone language backgrounds on musical pitch perception. Scientific Reports, 15, Article 31558. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-17171-2
21.
ChoiW.ChiuM. M. (2023). Why aren’t all Cantonese tones equally confusing to English listeners?Language and Speech, 66(4), 870–895. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309221139789
22.
ChoiW.LaiV. K. W. (2023). Does musicianship influence the perceptual integrality of tones and segmental information? The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 154(2), 852–862. https://doi.org/10.1121/100.0020579
ChoiW.TongX.SamuelA. G. (2019). Better than native: Tone language experience enhances English lexical stress discrimination in Cantonese-English bilingual listeners. Cognition, 189, 188–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.04.004
25.
ChoiW.TsuiK. Y. R. (2023). Perceptual integrality of foreign segmental and tonal information: Dimensional transfer hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 45(4), 1056–1073. https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0272263122000511
26.
CutlerA. (2012). Native listening: Language experience and the recognition of spoken words. MIT Press.
27.
DongH.ClayardsM.BrownH.WonnacottE. (2019). The effects of high versus low talker variability and individual aptitude on phonetic training of Mandarin lexical tones. PeerJ, 7, Article e7191. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7191
28.
EvansJ.YehW. C.KulkarniR. (2018). Acoustics of tone in Indian Punjabi. Transactions of the Philological Society, 116(3), 509–528. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968x.12135
29.
FarisM. M.BestC. T.TylerM. D. (2016). An examination of the different ways that non-native phones may be perceptually assimilated as uncategorized. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 139(1), EL1–EL5. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4939608
30.
FarisM. M.BestC. T.TylerM. D. (2018). Discrimination of uncategorised non-native vowel contrasts is modulated by perceived overlap with native phonological categories. Journal of Phonetics, 70, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2018.05.003
31.
FlegeJ. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In StrangeW. (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 229–273). York Press.
GandourJ. (1981). Perceptual dimensions of tone: Evidence from Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 9(1), 20–36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23753516
34.
GuionS. G.FlegeJ. E.Akahane-YamadaR.PruittJ. C. (2000). An investigation of current models of second language speech perception: The case of Japanese adults’ perception of English consonants. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 107(5), 2711–2724. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.428657
35.
HalléP. A.ChangY.-C.BestC. T. (2004). Identification and discrimination of Mandarin Chinese tones by Mandarin Chinese vs. French listeners. Journal of Phonetics, 32(3), 395–421. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0095-4470(03)00016-0
36.
HussainQ.ProctorM.HarveyM.DemuthK. (2020). Punjabi (Lyallpuri variety). Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 50(2), 282–297. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100319000021
37.
KanR. T. Y.SchmidM. S. (2019). Development of tonal discrimination in young heritage speakers of Cantonese. Journal of Phonetics, 73, 40–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2018.12.004
KeatingP.KuoG. (2012). Comparison of speaking fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(2), 1050–1060. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4730893
KuhlP. K.IversonP. (1995). Linguistic experience and the “perceptual magnet effect.” In StrangeW. (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research (pp. 121–154). York Press.
42.
LenthR. V. (2022). Emmeans: Estimate marginal means, aka least-squares means. R package version 1.7.2. Available: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=emmeans.(February2022)
43.
LeungA. (2008). Tonal assimilation patterns of Cantonese L2 speakers of Mandarin in the perception and production of Mandarin tones. In Proceedings of the 2008 CLA annual conference (pp. 1–15).
44.
LiD. C. S.ChukJ. Y. P. (2015). South Asian students’ needs for Cantonese and written Chinese in Hong Kong: A linguistic study. International Journal of Multilingualism, 12(2), 210–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2015.1009375
45.
LiX.ToC. K. S.NgM. L. (2017). Effects of L1 tone on perception of L2 tone—A study of Mandarin tone learning by native Cantonese children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(3), 549–560. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1366728916000195
46.
LoganJ. S.LivelyS. E.PisoniD. B. (1991). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first report. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 89(2), 874–886. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1894649
47.
LohK. Y. E.TseS. K.TsuiS. K. (2013). A study of the effectiveness of a school-based Chinese characters curriculum for non-Chinese speaking kindergarteners: Hong Kong experience (in Chinese). Journal of Han Character Education and Research, 30, 277–323. https://doi.org/10.15670/hace.2013.30.1.277
48.
LoneF. N.ChowB. W.-Y. (2022). Pre-primary education and Chinese language acquisition of ethnic minority students in Hong Kong: A multidisciplinary critical evaluation. Asian Education and Development Studies, 11(4), 691–701. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeds-04-2021-0081
49.
NaraK. (2016). Acoustic analysis of Punjabi stress and tone (Doabi dialect). The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 139(4), 2215–2215. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4950628
50.
PisoniD. B. (1973). Auditory and phonetic memory codes in the discrimination of consonants and vowels. Perception & Psychophysics, 13(2), 253–260. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03214136
51.
R Core Team. (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.r-project.org/index.html
52.
ReidA.BurnhamD.KasisopaB.ReillyR.AttinaV.RattanasoneN. X.BestC. T. (2015). Perceptual assimilation of lexical tone: The roles of language experience and visual information. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 77(2), 571–591. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-014-0791-3
SinghA.PandeyD.AgrawalS. S. (2015). Analysis of Punjabi tonemes. In 2015 2nd International conference on computing for sustainable global development (INDIACom) (pp. 1694–1697). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7100536
55.
SoC. K.BestC. T. (2010). Cross-language perception of non-native tonal contrasts: Effects of native phonological and phonetic influences. Language and Speech, 53(2), 273–293. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830909357156
56.
SoC. K.BestC. T. (2014). Phonetic influences on English and French listeners’ assimilation of Mandarin tones to native prosodic categories. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36(2), 195–221. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263114000047
57.
StrangeW. (2011). Automatic selective perception (ASP) of first and second language speech: A working model. Journal of Phonetics, 39(4), 456–466.
58.
TylerM. D.BestC. T.FaberA.LevittA. G. (2014). Perceptual assimilation and discrimination of non-native vowel contrasts. Phonetica, 71(1), 4–21. https://doi.org/10.1159/000356237
59.
WangY.Bundgaard-NielsenR. L.BakerB. J.MaxwellO. (2022). Perceptual overlap in classification of L2 vowels: Australian English vowels perceived by experienced Mandarin listeners. In Proceedings of the 36th Pacific Asia conference on language, information and computation (pp. 317–324). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2022.paclic-1.35
60.
WerkerJ. F.TeesR. C. (1984). Phonemic and phonetic factors in adult cross-language speech perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 75(6), 1866–1878. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.390988
61.
WongJ. W. S.AraiT. (2020). The effects of tonal experience on the categorization of Cantonese lexical tones into Japanese native pitch accent categories. In Proceedings of 10th international conference on speech prosody 2020 (pp. 484–488). https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-99
62.
YuA. C. L.LeeC. W. T.LanC.MokP. P. K. (2022). A new system of Cantonese tones? Tone perception and production in Hong Kong South Asian Cantonese. Language and Speech, 65(3), 625–649. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309211046030
63.
ZhangL.ZhuJ.ShaoJ.ZhangC. (2024). The combined effects of bilingualism and musicianship on listeners’ perception of non-native lexical tones. Speech Communication, 165, 103147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2024.103147
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
