Young infants can discriminate a great variety of speech sounds both native and nonnative in their language environment. The focus of the perceptual reorganisation research to date has been on infants’ discrimination of nonnative segments, in particular, consonants and vowels. In tone languages (eg. Cantonese, Mandarin, and Thai) phonemic distinctions are signalled not only by consonants and vowels, but also by lexical tone – consisting of variations in fundamental frequency (pitch) and related features. Although such languages are spoken by over half the world’s population, the development of lexical tone perception has been relatively neglected. This thesis addresses whether perceptual reorganisation occurs for tone in infancy. Overall, the results of experiments conducted support the hypotheses and the existence of perceptual reorganisation for tone in infancy, similar to that for consonants and vowels. Implications of the results for speech perception development theories, “tone space”, tone acquisition, and early word learning are discussed, and future studies relating to these issues suggested. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/235447 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Mattock, Karen, University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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