Training American listeners to perceive Mandarin tones has been shown to be effective, with trainees' identification improving by 21%. Improvement also generalized to new stimuli and new talkers, and was retained when tested six months after training [Y. Wang, M. Spence, A. Jongman, and J. Sereno, JASA 106, 3649-3658 (1999)]. The present study investigates whether the tone contrasts gained perceptually transferred to production. Before their perception pretest and after their posttest, the

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... ees were recorded producing a list of Mandarin words. Their productions were first judged by native Mandarin listeners in an identification task. Identification of trainees' posttest tone productions improved by 18% relative to their pretest productions, indicating significant tone production improvement after perceptual training. Acoustic analyses of the pre-and post-training productions further reveal the nature of the improvement, showing that posttraining tone contours approximate native norms to a greater degree than pre-training tone contours. Furthermore, pitch height and pitch contour are not mastered in parallel, with the former being more resistant to improvement than the latter. These results are discussed in terms of the relationship between non-native tone perception and production as well as learning at the suprasegmental level.