This study examined the differential effects of systematic perception and production practice and the role of musical ability in learning Mandarin tone-words by native English-speaking adults in a training study. In this study, all participants (N = 38; 19 for each practice group) were first taught declarative knowledge of Mandarin tones and of the target words on the first day. They had to reach criterion performance on the test of vocabulary before they started to engage in either perception or production practice on the second day. Each participant went through three practice sessions on three separate days. Immediate posttests assessing learning outcomes in both perceptive and productive skills were administered on the last day. Musical tonal ability tests were administered to all participants and used as a covariate. The results showed that performance was far worse when participants were tested on the reverse skill than when they were tested on the practiced skill in terms of both error rates and reaction times, providing strong support for the skill-specificity hypothesis. Musical tonal ability was found to correlate with accuracy performance in both tone-word perception and production.