Research project Learning tones: The influence of pitch accent language experience on lexical tone perception (LETO)

In some languages, the meaning of a word is determined by the melody of the voice, that is by prosodic features. Mandarin and Cantonese are examples of such tonal languages. A falling /i/ can in these languages differ as much from a rising /i/ as /i/ differs from /a/ in Swedish. More than half of the world's infants have a tonal language as their their mother tongue.

In other languages, such as English and Spanish, the tones are, on the contrary, irrelevant to the meaning of the words. There are also accent languages, where the tone sometimes has relevance to the meaning of the words, such as Swedish and Norwegian. 

Together with research groups in ten countries, the research group at the Department of Linguistics is investigating at what age infants learn to distinguish these variations depending on the language environment.