Assessing the perceptual contributions of vowels and consonants to Mandarin sentence intelligibility

Abstract

This study investigated the perceptual contributions of vowels and consonants to Mandarin sentence intelligibility. Mandarin sentences were edited using a noise-replacement paradigm to preserve various amounts of segmental information and presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. The vowel-only Mandarin sentences yielded a remarkable 3:1 intelligibility advantage over the consonant-only sentences. This advantage is larger than that obtained with English sentences, suggesting that vowels may have a greater contribution to sentence intelligibility in Mandarin than in English. Although providing information redundant to contributions from vowel centers, a little vowel-consonant boundary transition would significantly improve the intelligibility of the consonant-only Mandarin sentences.

Relative contributions of vowels and consonants in recognizing isolated Mandarin words

“…Similar results were also found in Kewley-Port et al (2007) and Fogerty and Humes (2012). A recent study concerning the segmental contribution to sentence intelligibility in Mandarin revealed a 3:1 advantage for the perception of the V-only sentences over the C-only sentences (Chen et al, 2013). This ratio was higher than that in English, suggesting that vowels might play an even greater role in Mandarin sentence intelligibility than consonants.…”

“…Similar findings were obtained in the study of Mandarin sentences (Chen et al, 2013). It is believed that the C-V transition contains coarticulatory information which helps the identification of adjacent phonemes (Recasens, 1999).…”

“…1 The word database and vowel/consonant boundary information will be provided upon request. Note that the recordings of isolated Mandarin CV syllables yielded much longer vowel durations than if they were recorded in a sentence context, i.e., 350 ms (in this study) vs. 190 ms (Chen et al, 2013).…”

“…For example, Nespor, Pena, and Mehler (2003) and Toro, Nespor, Mehler, and Bonatti (2008) found that vowels contain information about prosody which is used to interpret the syntactic structure, whereas consonants' higher distinctive power within a word provides more cues for lexical identification than vowels. There are a number of investigations on the relative contributions of vowels and consonants to speech (word and sentence) intelligibility (e.g., Chen & Loizou, 2012;Chen, Wong, & Wong, 2013;Cole, Yan, Mak, Fanty, & Bailey, 1996;Fogerty & Humes, 2010;Fogerty & Humes, 2012;Kewley-Port, Burkle, & Lee, 2007;Owren & Cardillo, 2006). The study of Cole et al (1996) showed a 2:1 advantage of vowels over consonants in word recognition at the sentence level using noise-replaced stimuli (i.e., vowel-only sentences with consonants replaced by noise, and vice versa).…”

Assessing the effect of noise-reduction to the intelligibility of low-pass filtered speech

“…Fogerty and Kewley-Port in [4] and Chen et al in [5] showed that the vowel-only sentences (i.e., preserving vowel segments and replacing consonant segments with silence or white noise) were more intelligible than the consonant-only sentences (i.e., vowels replaced by silence or white noise) in both English and Mandarin. Considering that vowels are characterized by their low frequencies, studies also assessed how low-pass filtering affected the intelligibility of vowel sentences in Mandarin and English [6].…”