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The effect of context duration on Mandarin listeners' tone normalization.
1Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, 500 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907 luo5@purdue.edu, kashmore@purdue.edu.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|August 7, 2014
Summary
Mandarin listeners use pitch context to recognize tones. This study found that a 250-millisecond context duration is critical for robust Mandarin tone normalization, influencing tone perception.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Auditory Perception
- Psychoacoustics
Background:
- Mandarin listeners exhibit tone normalization, adjusting tone recognition based on contextual pitch cues.
- Understanding the temporal dynamics of this normalization is crucial for comprehending speech perception.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the effect of context duration on Mandarin tone normalization.
- To determine the critical duration of preceding pitch context required for robust tone normalization.
Main Methods:
- Participants listened to target tones (Tone 1 to Tone 2) preceded by phrases of varying durations.
- Preceding phrases had mean fundamental frequencies (F0s) of either 160 Hz (low) or 200 Hz (high).
- Listener responses for tone recognition were analyzed based on context duration and F0.
Main Results:
- A high-F0 context significantly increased Tone-2 responses compared to a low-F0 context, even with short durations (125 ms).
- The contrastive context effect reached saturation with 250-ms contexts.
- This indicates that 250 ms is a critical duration for effective tone normalization.
Conclusions:
- Context duration plays a significant role in Mandarin tone normalization.
- A minimum context duration of 250 ms is necessary for robust pitch-based tone normalization in Mandarin.
- These findings contribute to understanding the temporal integration of acoustic cues in speech perception.
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