2007/07/04

Xu, Y. (1994). Production and perception of coarticulated tones. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 95(4), 2240–2253.

Presentation: Angela
Summary: Sarah

This study investigates the production and perception of tonal coarticulation in Mandarin Chinese. Specifically, Tone 2 (rising tone) and Tone 4 (falling tone) were targeted. Syllables with these two tones were placed in the middle position of tri-syllabic words, with either compatible or conflicting adjacent tonal contexts. The production experiment showed that in the compatible context, both tones remained intact; in contrast, they deviated greatly from their canonical tonal contours in the conflicting context, especially Tone 2. Three further perception experiments were conducted. In the first perception experiment, with the omission of the semantic information, the identification of both tones was high, while in the second experiment, when target tone syllables were presented to subjects in isolation, the accuracy of tonal identification dropped significantly. For syllables from the conflicting contexts, the accuracy rate was even below the chance level. In the third experiment, the preceding and following syllables of the target tone were swapped, resulting in the alternation of the tonal contexts. Results showed that after the alternation, the identification rate was high for the original compatible context, but not for the original conflicting contexts. To sum up, these results together illustrated that tonal contexts had significant effects on tonal coarticulation, and when identifying coarticulated tones, listeners would shift the perceived pitch value away from the adjacent pitch value in order to compensate for its effect.