Abstract
With few exceptions, modern psychometric concepts and methods are not part of the “standard” toolkit used to analyze linguistic data. Data from Kam (or Dong), an under-studied language of China with a very complex tone system, is used to illustrate how a psychometric approach can help investigate inter-individual differences in the perception of tone contrasts in an AX task, and the factors that may influence them, including working memory, age, gender, and years of formal education. We show that these methods uncover an unexpected structure of the responses, as some items designed as “different” based on the language’s phonology were instead perceived as “same”, prompting a recoding of these items in line with their perception. The subsequent use of % correct responses, Signal Detection Theory, multiple regression, mediation, and path analysis, found a complex network of influences on the AX task: there are direct effects of age, education and working memory, but only an indirect effect of gender. Therefore, even such a “simple” AX task can benefit from this approach, and we argue, in this primarily methodological paper which also includes directly usable extensive computer code in R, that modern psychometrics should be more widely used in linguistics.
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Data availability
Due to ethical and legal restrictions, the primary data is available upon request by contacting the corresponding author, M.W. All the R code is available in the GitHub repository https://github.com/ddediu/tone_ax_dong, but cannot be run without the primary data; nevertheless, the compiled report (in HTML format) containing all the analyses and plots is provided in this repository.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank our participants, as well as Ms. Liu Xianxian, Ms. O, Xianglan, Ms. Wu Yanglin, Ms. Wu Yunxia, Mr. Tao Kexing, Mr. Zhang Bolun. Ms. Liao Zengliang, Ms. Wu Pinglu, and Ms. Wu Jinhua for assistance with data collection. We thank Alexandra L. Dima for making the 6 steps R script freely available and for help with psychometric questions. We also thank Hoyee Wong Hirai for her assistance with data analysis, and five anonymous reviewers for feedback and suggestions. DD acknowledges Grant No. PID2022-138501NB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (Spain) and by ERDF/EU.
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P.C.M.W and M.W. conceived the study. P.C.M.W, M.W. and L.W. designed the tasks. M.W. and L.W. conducted the experiment and collected the data. L.W. performed a preliminary analysis. D.D. conducted the analysis and wrote the manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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This study was approved by the Joint Chinese University of Hong Kong and New Territories East Cluster Clinical Research Ethics Committee Ref. No. 2013.663 (initial approval date: 23/01/2014, renewal date: 23/01/2022). The research was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Informed consent was obtained from all participants and/or their legal guardian(s).
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Dediu, D., Wang, L., Wong, P.C.M. et al. Psychometric methods and signal detection theory uncover subtle differences in the perception of tone contrasts in speakers of Kam (Dong). Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-46380-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-46380-6
