Cue-trading of tonal perception in Hai'an Mandarin

Abstract

It has been known that the perception of a phonological category is sensitive to cue trading among multiple phonetic parameters (Liberman, 1996; Francis et. al., 2008; Holt and Lotto, 2006). Following Abramson and Erickson (1992), this paper further explores the question of whether the perception of tonal categories in a Chinese dialect, Hai'an Mandarin, is sensitive to the trade-off between the VOT (voice onset time) of the onset of a mono-syllabic word and fundamental frequencies (F0) of the rhyme of the word. The interactions between VOT and F0 for the bootstrapping of the tonal categories are discussed in the context of several perceptual experiments. It is suggested that such psychological basis of tone perception is in tune with one tonogenesis theory, which says that tonal contrasts are generated as compensation for the loss of voicing distinction of the onset consonants (Hombert et al., 1979).