Listen for the tone6 December 1999
PHILIP
BALL
Non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese are often
embarrassed by their confusion between 'mother' and
'horse' – with potentially disastrous social
consequences. Both words are represented in Mandarin by
the character written in the pinyin system as
ma. But a native Mandarin speaker will
distinguish them by using different tones.
Now a report in the Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America1
suggests why English speakers find it so hard to
discriminate their horses from their mothers: they have
been trained in their own language to listen for
different auditory cues from those used by Chinese
people.
Yet all is not lost, say the researchers Yue Wang
from Cornell University, USA, and colleagues. Americans,
they find, can show a substantial improvement in their
ability to discriminate between different Mandarin tones
over just two weeks of training -and this ability
remains for at least six months.
The tonal nature of Mandarin Chinese poses the
greatest obstacle to its assimilation and comprehension
by Western speakers. The difficulty is even greater than
that experienced by French speakers trying to hear the
different kinds of th in English, or by Japanese
attempting to discern an l from an r.
Mandarin uses four different tones to convey the
various different meanings of word-sounds like ma
(it has other meanings too). Tone 1 has a high-level
pitch, tone 2 is high and rising, tone 3, low and
dipping, and tone 4, high and falling. The duration of
the various tones also differs.
The problem for Westerners is that they are not
accustomed to using these tones as keys to meaning.
Studies have shown that native Mandarin speakers judge
meaning from tone on the basis of both the 'height' of
the initial pitch (high or low) and its 'contour' – the
way the pitch varies in time. But the contour of a sound
plays barely any role in Western languages as a vehicle
for meaning, and so Western ears seem to attach more
importance to what they can hear more readily:
differences in height.
Another way of saying this is that Western speakers'
understanding of Mandarin is likely to be hindered
because the roles that they have learnt to associate
with intonation in their own language will interfere
with their ability to assign new roles in another
language. This 'interference' is known already to
operate at the level of sound fragments, 'phonemes',
that make up words. The study by Wang and colleagues
reinforces the idea that it operates too at a tonal
level.
The researchers trained eight American speakers over
two weeks to distinguish between the four tones as
spoken by six native Mandarin speakers. At the end of
the training, the subjects performed 21% better in tests
of tonal discrimination, showing that perception of
tones, like phonemes, is susceptible to practice.
Tones 1 and 4 were the most resistant to improvement.
This might seem surprising, since 2 and 3 are actually
the most 'alien' to English-speaking ears. Yet that, it
seems, is the whole point: the trainees were more easily
confused by tones 1 and 4 because their very similarity
with English sounds led them astray, encouraging them to
apply a pre-existing yet inappropriate set of criteria.
In one sense, the more alien the language, the less one
is misled by it. |
