Investigating the influence of context frequency on lexical tone perception.

Abstract

Tone languages such as Mandarin use pitch variations to contrast meaning. Within tone languages, large variability exists in the pitch of tones produced by different speakers. However, previous studies of speaker normalization for contour tones have produced inconsistent results; whether speakers rely on context information in tone perception is unclear. The present study intended to provide an unambiguous test of the effect of context on contour lexical tone perception and to explore its underlying mechanisms and sources of information. In four experiments, Mandarin listeners’ perceptions of Mandarin first and second (level and rising) tones were investigated with preceding speech and nonspeech contexts. Results indicate that (1) the mean fundamental frequency (f0) of a preceding sentence affects the perception of contour lexical tones and the effect is spectrally contrastive: Following a sentence with a higher‐frequency mean f0, a following word is more likely to be perceived as a low‐frequency tone and...