Age effects in tonal comprehension in Cantonese
广东话声调理解的年龄影响
Rosemary Varley 华莉莉; Lydia K.H. So 苏周简开
Abstract 摘要
Subjects drawn from three age bands completed a lexical comprehension test for Cantonese. The test required subjects to select a target word from three distractors. Age effects emerged on the test. Factors which had to be considered in the interpretation of this effect included, in addition to age, educational and occupational level, and language history. Older subjects had particular difficulty in making tonal discriminations. Tonal confusions occurred when tone pairs had similar heights, contours or both. The possibility that older subjects have difficulty in making tonal discriminations when words are presented in isolation is discussed. The importance of placing a lexical item in a linguistic context in order to provide relative tonal information for older subjects is considered.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics volume 23 (ISSN 0091-3723)
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