Context Matters for Tone and Intonation Processing in Mandarin

Abstract

In tonal languages such as Mandarin, both lexical tone and sentence intonation are primarily signaled by F0. Their F0 encodings are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in congruency. The present study investigated how tone and intonation, with F0 encodings in conflict or in congruency, are processed and how semantic context may affect their processing. To this end, tone and intonation identification experiments were conducted in both semantically neutral and constraining contexts. Results showed that the overall performance of tone identification was better than that of intonation. Specifically, tone identification was seldom affected by intonation information irrespective of semantic contexts. However, intonation identification, particularly question intonation, was susceptible to the final lexical tone identity and affected by the semantic context. In the semantically neutral context, questions ending with a rising tone and a falling tone were equally difficult to identify. In the semantically constraining context, questions ending with a falling tone were much better identified than those ending with a rising tone. This perceptual asymmetry suggests that top-down information provided by the semantically constraining context can play a facilitating role for listeners to disentangle intonational information from tonal information, but mainly in sentences with the lexical falling tone in the final position.

Mind the subtle f0 modifications: The interaction of tone and intonation in Sinitic varieties

“…Standard Chinese thus seems to favor preserving tonal identity at the lexical level even at the risk of intonation misidentification. This is also reflected in the high accuracy rate in native listeners' lexical tone identification regardless of intonation type and their difficulty in recognizing statement vs. question, especially when the utterance-final tone is T35 (Yuan 2011, Liu et al 2021. A similar asymmetry in intonation identification (between rising and falling tones) has also been reported in neural processing studies (Ren et al 2009, Ren et al 2013, Liu et al 2016.…”

Floating Boundary Tone: Production and Perception of Syntactically Unmarked Polar Question in Tianjin Mandarin

“…On the contrary, those with Tone-2 final syllables were the most difficult ones to identify. Liu et al (2021) examined the identification of Standard Mandarin intonation with semantically neutral context and semantically constraining context. They found that, in syntactically unmarked polar questions, T4 (HL) had slightly higher identification accuracy in semantically constraining context, but had marginally lower accuracy in nonconstraining context than T2 (LH).…”