a) Purpose of the research:
The current study aims to fill in the gap by investigating whether differences in syllable structures affect the perceptual accuracy of speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages who have never been exposed to Thai.
b) Research question:
How does perceptual accuracy differ between native speakers of tonal languages and non-tonal languages?
c) Method:
Participants, native speakers of Mandarin (a tonal language) and English (a non-tonal language) who have never been exposed to Thai, were recruited through snowball sampling. They performed a discrimination task involving the syllables /kat/, /kak/, and /kap/ with high, low or falling tones. Participants were asked to determine whether the tones of the two words in a stimuli were the same or different.
d) Type of research data gathered:
Participants' responses to each stimulus (same or different)
e) Data processing steps: 
Participants' language backgrounds and responses were extracted from the raw data gathered on Qualtrics. Data from participants who did not fully complete the task were removed before exporting.
f) The type of analyses conducted:
Quantitative analysis was conducted using logistic regression in RStudio to assess overall performance across language groups and the effect of language on perceptual accuracy. Qualitative analysis involved exploratory observation of each participant's correct and incorrect responses, as well as individual error analysis.