The Identification of Tone in Chinese Hearing-Impaired and Hearing-Normal Children

Autor: Jing-ni Ou, 歐菁妮
Rok vydání: 2002
Druh dokumentu: 學位論文 ; thesis
Popis: 90
This study aims to investigate the identification of Mandarin tone and the time course of this identification process in hearing-normal and hearing-impaired children. The gating paradigm proposed by Grosjean (1980) is adopted. Three groups of subjects- hearing-normal adults, hearing-normal children, and hearing-impaired children participated in this study. These three groups were tested with two sets of words: monosyllabic word and disyllabic word. Task procedures and material types were modified according to their different characteristics in perceiving linguistic materials and their language ability. Results indicated that both child groups could recognize a tone well before they have received the complete acoustic-phonetic information of a tone, just in the same way as adults did. Moreover, Tone 1 and Tone 4 were first identified in the time course of tone perception and then Tone 3 and Tone 2 in the monosyllable words. Besides, Tone 1 and Tone 4 needed less than half sensory information of the syllable to be identified, whereas Tone 2 and Tone 3 needed more than half of the syllable. However, in the gating task of disyllabic words, the identification point moved much forward in all three groups. All tones needed much less than half sensory information of the syllable. Two supportive sources were identified for the gain in the disyllabic words: lexical support and tonal context. Between these two sources, tonal context appeared to contribute to the gain in the disyllabic words. This suggested that the hearing-impaired group have difficulties in handling pitch pattern that changes rapidly over time. In addition, in tone identification, F0 movement seems to be perceptually more important and more stable than F0 height for Mandarin Chinese listeners.
Databáze: Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations
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