Development of tone perceptions in Cantonese-learning infants

Infants begin life with a remarkable ability to discriminate a wide range of phonetic contrasts, both native and non-native. Within the first year of life, infants’ phonetic discrimination ability undergoes a significant reorganization from being language-general to being language-specific. However, the developmental pattern is actually more complex than previously thought: Certain contrasts can only be discriminated in the second half of the first year. This project probes Cantonese-learning infants’ ability to discriminate lexical tones in their native language. Lexical tones are considered an expansion of the phoneme inventory in a tone language, where pitch variations also signal lexical meaning differences. Through Cantonese which contrasts its lexical tones through changes in pitch height and pitch contour, this project examines how the development of lexical tone perception in Cantonese-learning infants is affected by the pitch characteristics of lexical tones.