The Effect of Lexicality, Frequency, and Markedness on Mandarin Tonal Categorization

Abstract

While the Ganong lexicality effect has been observed for phonemic and tonal categorization, the effects of frequency and markedness are less clear, especially in terms of tonal categorization. In this study, we use Mandarin Chinese to investigate the effects of lexicality, tone frequency and markedness. We examined Mandarin speakers’ tonal categorization of tokens on all possible tonal continua with one end being a word and the other being a tonotactic gap (i.e., an unattested syllable-tone combination). The results of a forced-choice identification experiment showed a general bias against the gap endpoints, with the noted exception of continua involving T4 (X51), the most frequent lexical tone. Specifically, when T4 served as the gap endpoint, no obvious bias against it was observed regardless of its lexical status. Moreover, on the T3–T4 continua, there was an apparent bias against T3 (X214), the tone with the most complex contour, again, regardless of lexicality, suggesting a strong markedness effect. Taken together, the results of this study show the individual effects of lexicality, tone frequency and markedness, as well as their interactions, which contribute to our understanding of tonal categorization in relation to lexical statistics (tone frequency) and phonology (markedness).

Perceptual effects of lexical competition on Cantonese tone categories

“…An ambiguous sound midway between a /t/ and /d/ was more likely to be identified as /t/ in a context like "?ask", and /d/ in a context like "?ash", because "task" is a real word (while *"dask" is not), and "dash" is a real word (while *"tash" is not). Similar Ganong-type lexical bias effects have been observed with different phoneme pairs (Connine, Titone, Deelman, & Blasko, 1997;Pitt, 1995), in different word positions (Pitt & Samuel, 1993, 1995, with words of varying lengths (Pitt & Samuel, 2006), and in tones (Fox & Unkefer, 1985; T. H. Yang, Jin, & Lu, 2019). Likewise, in phoneme restoration studies, for example, listeners report hearing a word as intact despite the presence of noise obscuring particular sounds in the word (Warren, 1970).…”

“…This suggests that, at least outside of a sentential context and syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic clues, listeners do not have particularly robust categorical responses at the end points. While direct comparison across our two experiments is not possible because of the lack of a shared dependent variable, the results are reminiscent of T. H. Yang et al (2019) and Fox and Unkefer (1985), both of which observed more categorical perception of (non-merging)…”

“…Items in Experiment 2 consisted of eight word-nonword tone pairs selected for each merging pair (T2-T5, T3-T6 and T4-T6), and 22 such pairs for each non-merging tone pair (T2-T3 and T5-T6). As in T. H. Yang et al (2019), these nonwords were accidental tonal gaps in the language.…”

“…For example, Fox and Unkefer (1985) find support for the Ganong effect for Mandarin tones with Mandarin listeners, but not English listeners, who lack the requisite lexical knowledge. This Ganong effect was recently replicated by T. H. Yang et al (2019). In Yang and colleagues' study, Mandarin listeners categorized items from lexical tone continua synthesized in PSOLA (Charpentier & Stella, 1986) and TANDEM-STRAIGHT (Kawahara et al, 2008).…”

“…Following T.H. Yang et al (2019), we used TANDEM-STRAIGHT (Kawahara et al, 2008) to synthesize 11-step continua. 5 TANDEM-STRAIGHT considers all available acoustic cues on the entire tone-bearing syllable for resynthesis (e.g., F0, duration, voice quality, etc.).…”