| dc.description.abstract | The current study examined the perception of Mandarin tones in different emotions by Dutch learners of Mandarin. As a tone language, Mandarin has both lexical tones and emotional intonation, which interact with each other. An interesting question arises as to how the co-existence of lexical tones and emotional intonation influence the perception of lexical tones in emotional speech by learners of Mandarin with a non-tone language as their L1. Past work on the acquisition of Mandarin tones has exclusively focused on lexical tones produced in neutral emotion. Consequently, current knowledge of the learning of Mandarin tones is confined to the citation forms of the tones and may not be generalizable to the perception of tones in natural speech where speakers often express an emotion other than the neural emotion. Against this background, we have investigated development in tonal perception in emotional speech in a second language learning setting, with the goal of putting forward a revised model of tonal acquisition from a perceptual perspective. In the current study, Dutch learners of Mandarin (beginners and advanced learners) were recruited as the experimental group, and native Mandarin speakers were also included in this study as the control group. All participants were asked to take part in the tonal perception task. In line with the previous studies, this study found that emotions affect the perception of Mandarin tones by Dutch learners of Mandarin. Additionally, other factors such as tones, and language proficiency also influence the perceptual performance to some extent. However, tonal context affected different proficiency groups differently, influencing advanced learners more than beginners. | |
