Categorical perception of lexical tone contrasts and gradient perception of the statement–question intonation contrast in Zhumadian Mandarin

Abstract

We intended to establish if two lexical tone contrasts in Zhumadian Mandarin, one between early and late aligned falls and another between early and late aligned rises, are perceived categorically, while the difference between declarative and interrogative pronunciations of these four tones is perceived gradiently. Presenting stimuli from 7-point acoustic continua between tones and between intonations, we used an identification task and a discrimination task with an experimental group of native listeners and a control group of Indonesian listeners, whose language employs none of the differences within either the falling or the rising pitch contours in its phonology. Only the lexical condition as perceived by the experimental group yielded sigmoid identification functions and a heightened discriminatory sensitivity around the midpoint of continua. The intonational condition in the native group and both conditions in the control group yielded gradient identification functions and smaller, reverse effects of the continuum midpoints in the discrimination task. The results are interpreted to mean that sentence modality contrasts can be expressed gradiently, but that lexical tone differences are represented phonologically, and hence are perceived categorically, despite low phonetic salience of the contrast. This conclusion challenges assumptions about the relation between linguistic functions and linguistic structures.

Context Matters for Tone and Intonation Processing in Mandarin

“…Some participants were able to identify almost all the question intonation without difficulty, whereas others could only identify a few question intonations correctly. It might be that the question-statement contrast in Mandarin is not expressed or perceived categorically, as has been found in Zhumadian Mandarin (Gussenhoven & Van de Ven, 2020), but further research is needed before we can make any strong claim. The challenge here in Mandarin intonation processing echoes the fundamental challenge facing prosody perception in general, which partly, if not all, comes down to the ambiguity arising from the continuous and variable nature of the prosodic signal itself (Tanenhaus et al, 2015).…”

“…Probably as a compensation mechanism, tonal languages have been found to develop more syntactic devices to express sentence-level meanings typically encoded by intonation than non-tonal languages (Torreira et al, 2014). With respect to Mandarin, as argued in Gussenhoven and Van de Ven (2020), it is perhaps not coincidental that Mandarin has developed rich sentence-final question particles to express interrogativity.…”

Perceptual Sensitivity to Tonal Alignment in Nuer

“…The phonetic realizations of the L and HL tones in Nuer are illustrated in Figure 2, which is based on data in Gjersøe (2019). This figure shows time-normalized F0 traces for the L and HL tones, averaged across items and speakers.…”

Internal structure of intonational categories: The (dis)appearance of a perceptual magnet effect

“…Over the past decades, researchers have primarily studied categoricality of pitch accents and boundary tones by examining an intonation boundary effect, the equivalent of the phoneme boundary effect, using a range of methods, such as the CP paradigm, a reaction time (RT) paradigm, and semantic identification (see Gussenhoven, 1999 ; Prieto, 2012 ; Gussenhoven and van de Ven, 2020 for reviews). Evidence for an intonation boundary effect has been at best inconsistent.…”