[The characteristic of lexical tone perception in native-mandarin normal hearing people]

Objective:The aim of this study is to explore the characteristic of lexical tone perception in nativemandarin normal hearing speakers.Method:Three types of continuum(Tone1/Tone2, Tone1/Tone4 and Tone2/Tone3) were constructed and each of them includes a 15 stimuli. All speech stimuli in these three continua were resynthesized by applying the PitchSynchronous OverLap and Add(PSOLA) method implemented in Praat to the same mandarin syllable, /a/, with a high level tone produced by a female native mandarin speaker. Forty native listeners of mandarin were recruited for this study and identification task was used to acquire the tonal perceptual data. SPSS 19.0 software was used to get the fitting curves of lexical tone perception. Result: The tone perception curves in nativemandarin normal hearing speakers were inverted Sshape. All the three tone perception curves showed steep upward or downward trend and obvious boundary.Each of tone perception curves has a definite intersection, and the tone perception performance has mutated at the intersection.Conclusion:There is the typically categorical perception of lexical tone identification in nativemandarin normal hearing people.