Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-bt4hw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T00:12:06.607Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

PERCEPTION PRACTICE, PRODUCTION PRACTICE, AND MUSICAL ABILITY IN L2 MANDARIN TONE-WORD LEARNING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Man Li  and
Robert DeKeyser
Man Li*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
Robert DeKeyser
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Man Li, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 3215 Jiménez Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail: manli@umd.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examined the differential effects of systematic perception and production practice and the role of musical ability in learning Mandarin tone-words by native English-speaking adults in a training study. In this study, all participants (N = 38; 19 for each practice group) were first taught declarative knowledge of Mandarin tones and of the target words on the first day. They had to reach criterion performance on the test of vocabulary before they started to engage in either perception or production practice on the second day. Each participant went through three practice sessions on three separate days. Immediate posttests assessing learning outcomes in both perceptive and productive skills were administered on the last day. Musical tonal ability tests were administered to all participants and used as a covariate. The results showed that performance was far worse when participants were tested on the reverse skill than when they were tested on the practiced skill in terms of both error rates and reaction times, providing strong support for the skill-specificity hypothesis. Musical tonal ability was found to correlate with accuracy performance in both tone-word perception and production.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 593 - 620
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

This study was supported by the PhD program of Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland. We would like to thank Drs. Steve Ross and Min Wang for their insightful suggestions and Dr. Robert Slevc for sharing the Wing Musical Aptitude Test and the tonal memory production test as well as for his advice on scoring the production test.

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, J. R. (1993). Rules of the mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Anderson, J. R., Bothell, D., Byrne, M. D., Douglass, S., Lebiere, C., & Qin, Y. (2004). An integrated theory of the mind. Psychological Review, 111, 1036–1060.Google Scholar
Antoniou, M., & Wong, P. C. M. (2016). Varying irrelevant phonetic features hinders learning of the feature being trained. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 139, 271–278. doi: 10.1121/1.4939736 Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2015). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer program]. Version 5.4.08. Retrieved 24 March 2015 from http://www.praat.org/.Google Scholar
Bradlow, A. R., Pisoni, D. B., Yamada, R. A., & Tohkura, Y. (1997). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 101, 2299–2310.Google Scholar
Chao, Y. R. (1948). Mandarin primer: An intensive course in spoken Chinese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Chobert, J., & Besson, M. (2013). Musical expertise and second language learning. Brain Science, 3, 923–940.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Cooper, A., & Wang, Y. (2012). The influence of linguistic and musical experience on Cantonese word learning. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 131, 4756–4769.Google Scholar
Cooper, A., & Wang, Y. (2013). Effects of tone training on Cantonese tone-word learning. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134, 133–139.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DeKeyser, R. M. (1997). Beyond explicit rule learning: Automatizing second language morphosyntax. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 195–221.Google Scholar
DeKeyser, R. M. (2007a). Introduction: Situating the concept of practice. In DeKeyser, R. M. (Ed.), Practice in a second language: Perspective from applied linguistics and cognitive psychology (pp. 1–18). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeKeyser, R. M. (2007b). Skill acquisition theory. In VanPatten, B. & Williams, J. (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (pp. 97–113). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
DeKeyser, R. M. (2015). Skill acquisition theory. In VanPatten, B. & Williams, J. (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition: An introduction (pp. 94–112). New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
DeKeyser, R. M., & Criado, R. (2012). Automatization, skill acquisition, and practice in second language acquisition. In Chapelle, C. A. (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
DeKeyser, R. M., & Sokalski, K. J. (1996). The differential role of comprehension and production practice. Language Learning, 46, 613–642.Google Scholar
Forster, K. I., & Forster, J. C. (2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 35, 116–124.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fromkin, V. A. (2000). Linguistics: An introduction to linguistic theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gottfried, T. L., Staby, A. M., & Ziemer, C. J. (2004). Musical experience and Mandarin tone discrimination and imitation. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 115, 2545.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffin, G., & Harley, T. A. (1996). List learning of second language vocabulary. Applied Psycholinguistics, 17, 443–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krashen, S. D. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. London, UK, and New York, NY: Longman.Google Scholar
Leather, J. (1990). Perceptual and productive learning of Chinese lexical tone by Dutch and English speakers. In Leather, J. & James, A. (Eds.), New Sounds 90: Proceedings of the Amsterdam Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Milovanov, R., & Tervaniemi, M. (2011). The interplay between musical and linguistic aptitudes: A review. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, Article 321.Google Scholar
Milovanov, R., Pietilä, P., Tervaniemi, M., & Esquef, P. A. A. (2010). Foreign language pronunciation skills and musical aptitude: A study of Finnish adults with higher education. Learning and Individual Differences, 20, 56–60.Google Scholar
Milovanov, R., Huotilainen, M., Välimäki, V., Esquef, P. A. A., & Tervaniemi, M. (2008). Musical aptitude and second language pronunciation skills in school-aged children: Neural and behavioral evidence. Brain Research, 1194, 81–89.Google Scholar
Rodgers, D. M. (2011). The automatization of verbal morphology in instructed second language acquisition. IRAL, 49, 295–319.Google Scholar
Schochet, P. (2008). Guidelines for multiple testing in impact evaluations of educational interventions. Technical Methods Report, The U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.Google Scholar
Shintani, N., Li, S., & Ellis, R. (2013). Comprehension-based versus production-based grammar instruction: A meta-analysis of comparative studies. Language Learning, 63, 296–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slevc, L. R., & Miyake, A. (2006). Individual differences in second-language proficiency: Does musical ability matter? Psychological Science, 17, 675–681.Google Scholar
Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In Susan, G. M. & Madden, C. G. (Eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 235–253). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
VanPatten, B. (2002). Processing instruction: An update. Language Learning, 52, 755–803.Google Scholar
Wang, Y., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. A. (2003). Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of Mandarin tone productions before and after perceptual training. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 113, 1033–1043.Google Scholar
Wang, Y., Spence, M. M., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. A. (1999). Training American listeners to perceive Mandarin tones. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 106, 3649–3658.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Webb, S. (2009). The effects of receptive and productive learning of word pairs on vocabulary knowledge. Regional Language Centre Journal, 40, 360–376.Google Scholar
Wing, H. D. (1968). Tests of musical ability and appreciation: An investigation into the measurement, distribution, and development of musical capacity (2nd ed.). London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wong, P. C. M., & Perrachione, T. K. (2007). Learning pitch patterns in lexical identification by native English-speaking adults. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 565–585.Google Scholar
Wong, P. C. M., Skoe, E., Russo, N. M., Dees, T., & Kraus, N. (2007). Musical experience shapes human brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch pattern. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 420–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Li and DeKeyser supplementary material

Li and DeKeyser supplementary material 1

Download Li and DeKeyser supplementary material(File)
File 57.3 KB