Some people say they are, some don't, and people like John Pasden over at Sinosplice prove with Praat, that of course they are. But I would like to point to a case, where upon observation by an L2 learner it might seem that the L1 speaker/learner do skip the tones, and from a point of learning, it is my opinion that they in a sense often do. I shall explain. L1 speaker 张三 Zhāng Sān and L2 speaker John Doe are listening to some kind of speech, broadcast, or whatever, and they encounter a word that neither of them recognizes. For 张三, being an average university-educated L1 speaker, this isn't very common, especially in comparison to John Doe, a B-something (CEFR) level L2 learner. For John Doe, practically every word spoken thus far, is new, and if it isn't he probably missed it anyway, owing to his limited listening skills. Well, how do they go about learning this word? 张三 just repeats the word (as he heard it) to his friend beside him, prof. 李四 Lǐ Sì, and asks what on earth it means. 李四 being a veritable dictionary makes it clear for 张三 through a bunch of usage examples that it means X. 张三 repeats the word again, to make sure he heard it right, and receives a nod in response. John does things differently though. He doesn't understand all those usage examples that 李四 gives, geesh, sounds like 文言 wényán or sumthin'. So instead he asks English speaker 张三 about the word. He imitates it, gets the tones all wrong, and is then told by 张三 (who has to think for a second or two first) what the tones are. John then asks what the meaning is, but 张三 can't come up with a translation. So, John has to consult a dictionary. He opens Pleco (or whatever it might be) on his phone, enters the 拼音 pīnyīn but can't find it. 张三 witnesses the confused look on John's face and notes to John that the speech is in a Southern-accented 普通话 Pǔtōnghuà so the 拼音 for one of the initial consonants is sh instead of s. John thanks him, enters the revised 拼音 and finds it. Then they all go to KTV and drink 白酒 báijiǔ. So, what's the difference, other than ability? Well, 张三 and 李四 never actually directly concerned themselves with tones. 张三 correctly picked up the pronunciation, and verified it with 李四, and that was the end of that. When he was inquired by John what the tones are, 张三 actually had to think a bit (albeit a very tiny bit) what the word sounded like in his head. John however, not being fully attuned to the sounds, had to dissect them into 拼音 so that he could find the word in Pleco. He thus had to be fully aware of the tones, and owing to the prescriptive nature of 拼音, aware even of some pronunciation differences between Northern-accented and Southern-accented 普通话. My point, no the tones aren't always important to L1 speakers, in the sense that they are rarely directly aware of them. What they are aware of are pronunciation patterns. They've since childhood internalized all the different tonal categories, in the form of a bunch of different words, and upon hearing a new word they can instantly recognize to which category it belongs. They do not think (unless prompted to) it sounds like 1-4 rather they think it sounds like all these other 1-4 words I know. If they can't classify it as belonging to a category, it sounds wrong. So, fellow learners, can L2 learners also reach a stage of non-awareness of the tones. Can we know them so well, that we also, for a moment, forget that they're even there? Finally, I'd like to say this; tones do not actually exist. They're part of an abstraction we have created to describe the different categories of pronunciation. What exists are words, and their pronunciations. But what do I know? I'm just a big-big fool thinker.
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