Relative contributions of vowels and consonants in recognizing isolated Mandarin words

Chen, Fei; Wong, Matthew; Zhu, Shufeng; Wong, Lena L. N.

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2015.04.003

Cited by 22 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The present work studied Mandarin tone identification in the combined E+A stimulation when consonants and only a portion of vowel onset segments were presented. Early work with intact Mandarin isolated words showed that while Mandarin consonant segments contained little information for lexical tone identification, listeners could make use of vowel onsets and vowel-consonant transitions for lexical tone identification [17]. Consistent with early work [17], this study also showed that in the scenarios of E and E+A stimulations, consonants plus a portion of vowel onsets across consonantvowel transitions contained much information for tone identification.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…All the words were spoken in isolation by a female native-Mandarin talker at a normal speaking rate and with broadcaster's voice quality. The fundamental frequency of recorded words ranged from 130 to 330 Hz [17].…”

Section: Subjects and Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, Cole et al suggested that in English sentences, vowel segments contained much more intelligibility information than consonant segments, rendering an intelligibility ratio of 2:1 [13]. Similarly, the relative perceptual importance of vowels vs. consonants was also found with sentences and isolated words in Mandarin [16][17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studying segmental contributions has been a common means for us to understanding the perceptual impacts of various speech segments (e.g., consonant-vowel transitions). Noise-Copyright © 2019 ISCA replacement paradigm was long used to examine the segmental contribution to speech perception [13][14][15][16][17]. That is, the segments of interest were preserved, and the rest segments were replaced with either noise or silence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Contributions of Consonant-Vowel Transitions to Mandarin Tone Identification in Simulated Electric-Acoustic Hearing

Chen

2019

Interspeech 2019

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For hearing-impaired listeners fitted with cochlear implants (CIs), they rely on electric (E) stimulation with primarily slow-varying temporal information but limited spectral information for their speech perception. Many recent studies showed that for those implanted listeners with residual lowfrequency hearing, the combined electric-acoustic (E+A) stimulation could significantly improve their speech perception in adverse listening conditions. The present work assessed the contributions of consonant-vowel transitions to Mandarin tone identification via a vocoder based simulation of E+A stimulation. Isolated Mandarin words were processed to preserve full consonants and vowel onsets across consonantvowel transitions, and replace the rest with noise. The two types of vocoded stimuli, simulating E and E+A stimulations, were presented to normal-hearing Mandarin-speaking listeners to identify lexical tones. Results consistently showed the advantage of E+A stimulation over E-only stimulation when full consonants and the same amount of vowel onset segments were preserved for lexical tone identification. In addition, compared with E stimulation with full vowel segments, the combined-stimulation advantage was observed even when only a small portion of vowel onset segments were presented. Results in this work suggested that in E+A stimulation, segmental contributions were able to provide tone identification benefit relative to E stimulation with the entire Mandarin words.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Subjects and Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Contributions of Consonant-Vowel Transitions to Mandarin Tone Identification in Simulated Electric-Acoustic Hearing

Chen

2019

Interspeech 2019

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“…More specifically, it is possible that learning Mandarin Chinese enhances sensitivity to vowels as a source of lexical contrast. Support for this comes from evidence that suggests lexical access in learners of Mandarin Chinese is more heavily constrained by vowel identity than by consonant identity (Chen et al., ; Wiener & Turnbull, ; see also Højen & Nazzi, ). Studies with English speakers, in contrast, have demonstrated that consonants carry a greater lexical load than vowels (Cutler, Sebastián‐Gallés, Soler‐Vilageliu, & Van Ooijen, ; Nespor et al., ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Novel Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage

Singh

Tay

et al. 2017

Child Development

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Previous studies revealing that monolingual and bilingual infants learn similar sounding words with comparable success are largely based on prior investigations involving single-feature changes in the onset consonant of a word. There have been no investigations of bilingual infants' abilities to learn similar sounding words differentiated by vowels. In the current study, 18-month-old bilingual and monolingual infants (n = 90) were compared on their sensitivity to a vowel change when learning the meanings of words. Bilingual infants learned similar sounding words differing by a vowel contrast, whereas monolingual English- and Mandarin-learning infants did not. Findings are discussed in terms of early constraints on novel word learning in bilingual and monolingual infants.

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Vowel, consonant, and tone variation exert asymmetrical effects on spoken word recognition: Evidence from 6-year-old monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin

Wewalaarachchi

Singh

2020

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Relative contributions of vowels and consonants in recognizing isolated Mandarin words

Cited by 22 publications

References 19 publications

Contributions of Consonant-Vowel Transitions to Mandarin Tone Identification in Simulated Electric-Acoustic Hearing

Contributions of Consonant-Vowel Transitions to Mandarin Tone Identification in Simulated Electric-Acoustic Hearing

Novel Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage

Vowel, consonant, and tone variation exert asymmetrical effects on spoken word recognition: Evidence from 6-year-old monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin

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