When speaker-listeners are exposed to an exaggerated primary cue, they spontaneously imitate the enhanced cue; e.g., English speakers imitate extended VOTs of voiceless stops (e.g., Nielsen, 2011). Kwon (2015) claims that speaker-listeners enhance the primary cue for the relevant contrast when exposed to an enhanced non-primary cue, showing that Seoul Korean speakers imitated aspirated stops with an enhanced non-primary cue (stop VOT) by exaggerating the primary cue for phonological aspiration in the language (post-stop f0). However, VOT in Seoul Korean, despite being a non-primary cue, may enjoy a special status, since it is required to maintain the full three-way laryngeal contrast in the language. This study examines how the non-primary cue enhancement is imitated when the cue is not necessary for the relevant contrast. Native speakers of American English heard and spontaneously imitated English /t/ with either extended VOT (the primary cue for English voicing contrast) or raised post-/t/ f0 (a non-primary cue). Participants' own productions of English /t/ and /d/ before and after the exposure were compared. Preliminary findings suggest that the participants produced /t/ with longer VOT and higher post-stop f0 after hearing the stimuli with either manipulation but to a lesser degree after the f0-raised stimuli than the VOT-extended stimuli. The role of a non-primary cue in spontaneous imitation will be discussed.

Previous studies on stop production in Mandarin Chinese have reported conflicting results on consonant-induced F0 perturbation (e.g., Xu and Xu, 2003, Luo, 2018). This study investigates whether Mandarin listeners use F0 information as a cue for consonant aspiration when F0 perturbation is limited and inconsistent in production. Specifically, we examine Mandarin listeners' perception of phonological /th/-/t/ contrast, focusing on how voice onset time (VOT) and post-stop F0 influence their perceptual judgments. Mandarin listeners heard /tu/∼/thu/ syllables with the initial stop co-varying in its VOT and post-stop F0 in the four lexical tone contexts, and were asked to identify the syllable they heard. Results demonstrate Mandarin listeners relied mainly on VOT for /th/-/t/ contrast, but the effect of VOT interacted with post-stop F0 and lexical tone. F0 did not influence the perceptual judgments when VOT was unambiguous. However, when VOT was ambiguous, Mandarin listeners identified the stops with high F0 as /th/, and those with low F0 as /t/. Lexical tones mediated this effect: Tones with low pitch onset elicited more unaspirated responses than those with high pitch onset. These findings suggest that Mandarin listeners use F0 as a secondary cue for consonant aspiration, but to different extent in different lexical tones.

This study examines the relation between plosive aspiration and post-plosive f0 (fundamental frequency) in the production and perception of the laryngeal contrast in Mandarin. Production data from 25 Mandarin speakers showed that, in word onsets, VOTs (voice onset time) of aspirated and unaspirated plosives were different, as expected. At the same time, the speakers produced different post-plosive f0 between aspirated and unaspirated plosives, but the difference varied according to the lexical tones – post-aspirated f0 was higher than post-unaspirated f0 in high-initial tones (i.e., lexical tones with high onset f0), but the pattern was the opposite and less robust in low-initial tones. In the perception of the same participants, VOT was the primary cue to aspiration but, when VOT was ambiguous, high post-plosive f0 yielded more aspirated responses in general. We claim that the asymmetry in f0 perturbation between high-initial and low-initial tones in production arises from different laryngeal maneuvers for different tonal targets. In low-initial tones, in which the vocal folds are slack and the glottal opening is wider, aspirated plosives have a lower subglottal air pressure than unaspirated plosives at the voicing onset, resulting in lower post-aspirated f0 than post-unaspirated f0. But in high-initial tones, the vocal folds are tense, which requires a higher trans-glottal pressure threshold to initiate phonation at the onset of voicing. As a result, the subglottal pressure does not decrease as much. Instead, the faster airflow in aspirated than unaspirated plosives gives rise to the pattern that post-aspirated f0 is higher than post-unaspirated f0. Regardless of this variation in production, our perception data suggest that Mandarin listeners generalize the f0 perturbation patterns from high-initial tones and associate high post-plosive f0 with aspirated plosives even in low-initial tone contexts. We cautiously claim that the observed perceptual pattern is consistent with the robustly represented production pattern, as high-initial tones are more prevalent and salient in the language and exhibit stronger f0 perturbation in the speakers' productions.

No abstract