The effects of amplitude and duration on the perception of English statements vs questions for native English and Chinese listeners.

Abstract

The current study investigated whether amplitude and duration cues were salient for signaling English questions versus statements for native Mandarin Chinese listeners. The F0 contours of the final word were manipulated continuously from falling to rising patterns with the amplitude or duration varied. English-native and Chinese-native (EN and CN) listeners identified whether they heard a statement or a question. Results showed that the performance of EN listeners was influenced by the change of amplitude and duration in question-statement identification, while CN listeners' performance was not, suggesting possible differences of cue weighting between the two groups in distinguishing English sentence types.