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Training studies · Variability · Perception and speech

What research says about learning tones

Can adults learn to hear the tones of a language they did not grow up with? Speech perception research has studied the question for decades, with Mandarin, Thai and other languages. The answer is a qualified yes, and the studies say a good deal about what kind of practice helps.

Why tones are hard for English speakers

English listeners hear pitch all the time, but they use it for the sentence: for questions, emphasis and emotion. Learning a tone language means treating pitch as part of each word, and attending to aspects of it that English listeners usually ignore. Early perception studies found that listeners from different language backgrounds weigh the dimensions of pitch differently: English speakers rely mostly on how high a pitch is, while speakers of tone languages pay more attention to its direction and shape (Gandour, 1983). Thai tones differ in both, so an English-trained ear tends to merge some of them.

Thai adds a further difficulty. Its mid and low tones are both fairly level and close together, and in one study even experienced learners of Thai found the pair harder to tell apart than native speakers did, especially in syllables with no final consonant (Wayland and Guion, 2003).

Training works

Much of what we know comes from a method first used to teach Japanese listeners the English r and l: listeners hear many words spoken by many different talkers, decide which category each belongs to, and are told at once whether they were right (Logan, Lively and Pisoni, 1991). It is now called high-variability phonetic training, and a review of 32 studies found it reliably improves both perception and pronunciation, with gains that last (Thomson, 2018).

For tones, the best-known study trained eight American learners of Mandarin in eight sessions over two weeks. Their accuracy in identifying tones rose by about 21 percentage points, the improvement carried over to words and talkers they had not trained on, and it was still there six months later (Wang, Spence, Jongman and Sereno, 1999). The trained learners also said the tones better afterwards, as judged by native listeners and by acoustic measurements, although they had practised only listening (Wang, Jongman and Sereno, 2003). The same transfer from hearing to speaking had been found for Japanese learners of r and l (Bradlow and colleagues, 1997).

Studies of Thai tones

  • Experience helps, but slowly. English-speaking learners of Thai told the mid and low tones apart better than people who had never studied Thai, but less well than native speakers (Wayland and Guion, 2003).
  • Short training improves the hardest pair. After training on the Thai mid and low tones, both English and Chinese listeners discriminated them better, and the Chinese listeners did better than the English ones (Wayland and Guion, 2004).
  • The method matters, and so does the first language. Comparing two training procedures, a follow-up study again found that Chinese listeners gained more than English listeners from the same amount of practice (Wayland and Li, 2008).

These are small laboratory studies with a handful of tone pairs, but they point the same way as the Mandarin work: focused listening practice with feedback changes what adult learners hear.

More variety is not always better

High variability (many talkers, many words, mixed together) is the standard recipe, and on average it works best. But a study of English speakers learning pitch contrasts in made-up words found that it helped only listeners who already had good pitch perception; learners who started out weaker did better when the training kept the talkers and conditions steady, and were actually held back by trial-to-trial variety (Perrachione, Lee, Ha and Wong, 2011). If tone drills feel like noise, simplify first: one voice, a few words, then widen out.

What this means for a learner

  • Practise hearing before you worry about saying. Perception training improves production by itself, and a learner who cannot hear a contrast has nothing to aim at.
  • Get immediate feedback. Every study above tells listeners at once whether they were right. Passive listening, however much, does not do the same job.
  • Use many voices, once you can. Practice with one teacher teaches you that teacher’s voice. Mix speakers, ages and sexes when the basic contrast is clear.
  • Work on the hard pairs. For English speakers of Thai, mid against low is the pair the studies single out; your own mistakes will show you the others.
  • Keep sessions short and regular. The Mandarin study above needed only eight sessions over two weeks to make a lasting difference.

The listening guide turns this into a routine, and the tone rules tell you which tone to expect from a spelling, which is the other half of hearing it.

The limits of the evidence

Most of these studies are small, test words said on their own rather than running speech, and measure improvement over weeks rather than years. They show that perception can be trained, not how well a learner will follow fast conversation. Tones in sentences behave differently from tones in isolated words (see prosody), and understanding speech also depends on vocabulary and context, which no amount of tone training replaces.

References

  • Bradlow, A. R., Pisoni, D. B., Akahane-Yamada, R., and Tohkura, Y. (1997). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101(4), 2299–2310. doi:10.1121/1.418276
  • Gandour, J. (1983). Tone perception in Far Eastern languages. Journal of Phonetics, 11(2), 149–175. doi:10.1016/S0095-4470(19)30813-7
  • Logan, J. S., Lively, S. E., and Pisoni, D. B. (1991). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first report. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 89(2), 874–886. doi:10.1121/1.1894649
  • Perrachione, T. K., Lee, J., Ha, L. Y. Y., and Wong, P. C. M. (2011). Learning a novel phonological contrast depends on interactions between individual differences and training paradigm design. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(1), 461–472. doi:10.1121/1.3593366
  • Thomson, R. I. (2018). High variability [pronunciation] training (HVPT): A proven technique about which every language teacher and learner ought to know. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 4(2), 208–231. doi:10.1075/jslp.17038.tho
  • Wang, Y., Jongman, A., and Sereno, J. A. (2003). Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of Mandarin tone productions before and after perceptual training. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113(2), 1033–1043. doi:10.1121/1.1531176
  • Wang, Y., Spence, M. M., Jongman, A., and Sereno, J. A. (1999). Training American listeners to perceive Mandarin tones. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(6), 3649–3658. doi:10.1121/1.428217
  • Wayland, R. P., and Guion, S. G. (2003). Perceptual discrimination of Thai tones by naive and experienced learners of Thai. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(1), 113–129. doi:10.1017/S0142716403000067
  • Wayland, R. P., and Guion, S. G. (2004). Training English and Chinese listeners to perceive Thai tones: A preliminary report. Language Learning, 54(4), 681–712. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2004.00283.x
  • Wayland, R. P., and Li, B. (2008). Effects of two training procedures in cross-language perception of tones. Journal of Phonetics, 36(2), 250–267. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2007.06.004

Questions people ask

Is it too late to learn tones as an adult?

No. Training studies consistently find that adults who have never spoken a tone language get better at hearing tones in a few weeks of practice, and keep much of the improvement months later. Adults rarely end up hearing tones exactly as native speakers do, but they get well past the point where tones stop blocking understanding.

Do speakers of Chinese or Vietnamese find Thai tones easier?

Usually, but not always in the way you might expect. Speakers of another tone language are used to listening for pitch in words, which helps; but they hear Thai tones through their own tone categories, which can make particular Thai pairs confusing. In Thai tone training studies, Chinese listeners have generally improved faster than English listeners.

Related

Learning to listenHow to train your ear for Thai: hearing tones and vowel length, the kinds of listening practice that help, and how to move from slow learner audio to real speech.Thai tone rulesHow to read the tone of any Thai syllable from its spelling: consonant class, tone mark, live or dead syllable and vowel length, in one table with worked examples.Rhythm and intonationHow Thai sounds above the level of the syllable: stressed and unstressed syllables, how tones change in fast speech, how intonation sits on top of the tones, and what the final particles do.Thai and English soundsWhere Thai and English sounds part company: aspiration, the six final consonants, tones against stress, vowel length, and the consonants English speakers find hardest.