Effects of affricate's aspiration on realization and perception of lexical tones in Standard Chinese

Consonants in /CV/ (i.e., a consonant + a vowel) syllables usually have potential influence on onset fundamental frequency (i.e., onset f0) of the following vowel. Previous research on effects of consonant's aspiration on onset f0 has mainly considered the stops. This study investigates not only the effects of aspiration with evidence from affricates, but also the effects of different language speakers (Japanese vs Chinese), on the onset f0 of the following vowel. Through examining acoustic data of f0 realization and perception data of two physical continua of f0 contours, it is observed that the onset f0 following aspirated affricates was higher than that following unaspirated affricates, but the magnitudes of differences varied with tones. Perception data of two physical continua indicated that a tone carried by aspirated affricates (or unaspirated affricates) tended to be perceived as the tone which has relatively lower (or higher) onset f0. Both the realization and perception performance of Japanese speakers resembled that of Chinese speakers, which may further confirm the hypothesis that the f0 perturbation caused by aspiration belongs to phonemic processing instead of phonological processing.