Northern Vietnamese Perception of Non-native Tones

We investigated native speaker perception of adult learner pronunciations of Northern Vietnamese tone contours to examine how listeners prioritize acoustic cues when they expect non-native speech. The non-native contours consisted of two adult learner renditions of the low falling-rising tone with sweeping final rises similar to and . One fell only as low as , whereas the other began lower than , as opposed to falling to a lower midpoint as in native speaker speech. We created two additional non-native renditions by crossing these contours with mid-tone creakiness. Consistent with [4], listeners in a speeded tone identification task prioritized voice quality and F0 offset (or rise slope) over F0 onset. Results also suggested that listeners adjusted their perceptions of tones as they encountered more stimuli. Because listeners required a self-paced task in order to use F0 onset, adult learners would likely improve their intelligibility by attenuating the F0 offset (or rise slope) in their productions of i. Learners may also be able to use the strength of the voice quality cue to overcome otherwise non-native F0 contours.