Improve Japanese C2L learners´ capability to distinguish Chinese tone 2 and tone 3 through perceptual training

In the process of Chinese learning, Tone 2 and Tone 3 are the most problematic pair for Japanese learners. We propose to develop a perceptual training paradigm to help them to gain efficiently the perceptual ability to distinguish the tones. A series of three studies were carried out: the first checked how difficult the Japanese learners produce the tones. The second investigated how differently Japanese and Chinese people perceive the two tones. The third tested a hybrid perceptual training paradigm lasting 6 days: a 2-days-long adaptive training followed by a 4-days-long high-variability training. Results of these studies not only improved our knowledge about tone production and perception patterns with respect to Japanese and Chinese speakers, but also showed the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid perceptual training paradigm which achieved a significant improvement of tone distinguishing ability (a relative error reduction of 77% in 6 days) by 6 Japanese participants.