Surface vs. Underlying Listening Strategies for Cross-Language Listeners in the Perception of Sandhied Tones in the Nanjing Dialect

This study is devoted to exploring surface/underlying listening strategies adopted by native and non-native, tone and non-tone language groups in their perception of sandhied tones, and the possible effect of the coarticulatory/non-coarticulatory nature of the sandhi rule on tone perception. The mapping between surface sandhied tones and underlying tones is investigated by a pair of Nanjing sandhi rules, one coarticulatory and the other non-coarticulatory, involving three groups of listeners: Dutch, Beijing, and native Nanjing, by means of a Concept Formation paradigm. Results reveal distinct perceptual patterns in the three groups. Dutch listeners experience difficulty in creating phonological representation for tones even in surface listening; Beijing listeners use their native ability at tone perception for interpreting Nanjing sandhied tones in surface tone perception, but have no access to underlying patterns; Nanjing listeners perceive native sandhied tones at both the underlying level and surface level and seem to always mix them when analyzing tones. The coarticulatory/non-coarticulatory nature of sandhi rules does not seem to play a role in the current experiment.