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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
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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.

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

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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.

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