Pitch shape modulates the time course of tone vs pitch-accent identification in Mandarin Chinese

In Mandarin Chinese pitch is used to express both lexical meanings via tones and sentence-level meanings via pitch-accents raising the question of which information is processed first. While research with meaningful sentence materials suggested a general processing advantage of tone over pitch-accents, research on pure tones and nonce speech in pre-attentive processing found that the f0-shape led to timing and site processing differences. The current study reconciles these results by exploring whether the tone advantage found in meaningful speech materials is modulated by the f0-shape by establishing via a gating paradigm the relative timing of tone and pitch-accent identification. Target words containing static (T1) and dynamic (T2, T4) tones were embedded into meaningful sentences and were divided into 50 ms gates which were added incrementally either from the left- or right-edge of the target word. Results showed that dynamic targets had either a tone or pitch-accent advantage contingent on the direction of gate processing. In contrast, for static T1 targets, tone and pitch-accent were identified simultaneously regardless of the direction of gate processing. Altogether, these results indicate that the f0-shape, as defined by pitch dimensions of f0 and pitch range, mediates the timing of tone and pitch-accent identification in meaningful speech supporting highly interactive models of speech perception.