Perception of checked tones in Xiapu Min

Abstract

Xiapu Min is a variety of Min Chinese spoken in Xiapu, Fujian, China. The language has seven tones, two of which (T53 and T21) are checked tones that only appear in syllables with a glottal stop coda (Chai and Ye, 2019). Compared with their unchecked counterparts, checked tones have distinct f0 contours, glottalization at the end of the syllable, and are of shorter duration. In this study, we investigate whether those acoustic features are used by listeners of Xiapu Min to identify whether a tone is checked or not. We ran a forced-choice identification task with resynthesized audio stimuli. Stimuli consisted of a natural unchecked token resynthesized with five distinct f0 contours. Each vowel was further modified to have a short versus long duration and presence versus absence of glottalization. The results indicate that the listeners are more likely to identify a stimulus as having a checked tone when it has a high-falling f0 contour (similar to checked T53), shorter duration, or glottalization, among which the duration has the largest coefficient. Thus, all three phonetic parameters found in checked tone production also influence checked tone identification. However, duration is more likely to matter for the identification of checkedness than f0 or glottalization.