I suspect the difference is more "academic" than otherwise. It would be interesting to give a Hong-Konger a test with pairs of characters, one of 1st tone and

I suspect the difference is more "academic" than otherwise. It would be interesting to give a Hong-Konger a test with pairs of characters, one of 1st tone and the other 7th tone, and see whether they can guess which is which. I suspect with minimal training they'd be able to score significantly better than random chance. (Willing to try it out!)