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Native Beijing listeners’ perceptual assimilation of Mandarin lexical tones produced by L2-Mandarin speakers from Yantai, Shanghai, and Guangzhou

The four lexical tones of standard Beijing Mandarin (henceforth, Mandarin), i.e., level, rising, dipping, and falling, are produced with regional accents by speakers from other regions of China. This study investigated how native Beijing listeners categorize and rate second language (L2) Mandarin tones produced by Yantai, Shanghai, and Guangzhou speakers, whose native dialect tone systems differ from Mandarin and from each other. Native Beijing listeners ( n = 35) heard Mandarin words (/ba, di, du, gu/ × 4 tones) produced by speakers of the three regional dialects and by Beijing speakers (baseline). For each word, they selected one of four minimal-tone quadruplet words and rated its similarity to Beijing pronunciation. While they identified the words with high accuracy (> 90%) in all four accents, the regionally accented words produced lower ratings and longer decision times than Beijing stimuli. This indicates that although native Beijing listeners reliably recognize regionally accented tones, the phonetic differences of regional accents from Mandarin modulates their tone identification. This study demonstrated the impact of regional L2 accents on Beijing listeners’ perception of Mandarin tones, laying a foundation for better understanding of how native listeners perceive non-native tone production.