Identification of English Edge Tones by Americans and Chinese Learners of English

Like tones in tonal languages, intonation of intonational languages also discriminates meaning. While the identification of tones relies exclusively on acoustic information, it is unclear about that of intonation. Edge tone refers to the pitch contour from nuclear to the boundary within an intonation group and it is essential to the meaning of this intonation group. Based on the tone notation system made by Chao (1930), this paper investigated the identification of 4 pure English edge tones (namely, 25, 13, 51 and 31) and 2 compound edge tones (513 and 351) by 8 native American speakers (aged 23-60) and 15 Chinese learners of English (aged 19-25). Six edge tones were presented in ABX paradigm with category assimilation task. There were four choices for X: same as A, same as B, same with both A and B, and same with neither A nor B. Every two of the 6 edge tones form an AB pair and the sequence of the pair members were counterbalanced (AB and BA). Therefore there were altogether 120 triplets and each contained 3 stimuli (A, B and X). The results showed that neither Chinese nor American listeners showed absolute identification of English edge tones as Chinese listeners identify tones; the overall performance of American listeners was significantly better than that of Chinese listeners; both Chinese and American listeners demonstrated better performance when the pair members were both pure tones and of opposite direction in pitch contour. The most interesting result was that for the pair of a pure tone plus a compound tone, listeners of both groups showed better performance in identification when the pure one was rising than when the pure tone was falling, consistent with the findings by Best (2014) which suggests the possibility of something special with rising as opposed to falling.