Huang Jingyuan, Holt Lori L
Department of Psychology and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2009 Jun;125(6):3983-94. doi: 10.1121/1.3125342.
Within tone languages that use pitch variations to contrast meaning, large variability exists in the pitches produced by different speakers. Context-dependent perception may help to resolve this perceptual challenge. However, whether speakers rely on context in contour tone perception is unclear; previous studies have produced inconsistent results. The present study aimed to provide an unambiguous test of the effect of context on contour lexical tone perception and to explore its underlying mechanisms. In three experiments, Mandarin listeners' perception of Mandarin first and second (high-level and mid-rising) tones was investigated with preceding speech and non-speech contexts. Results indicate that the mean fundamental frequency (f0) of a preceding sentence affects perception of contour lexical tones and the effect is contrastive. Following a sentence with a higher-frequency mean f0, the following syllable is more likely to be perceived as a lower frequency lexical tone and vice versa. Moreover, non-speech precursors modeling the mean spectrum of f0 also elicit this effect, suggesting general perceptual processing rather than articulatory-based or speaker-identity-driven mechanisms.
在使用音高变化来区分意义的声调语言中，不同说话者发出的音高存在很大差异。依赖上下文的感知可能有助于解决这一感知挑战。然而，说话者在曲折调感知中是否依赖上下文尚不清楚；先前的研究结果并不一致。本研究旨在明确测试上下文对曲折调词汇声调感知的影响，并探索其潜在机制。在三个实验中，通过前导语音和非语音上下文，研究了普通话听众对普通话第一声和第二声（高平调和平升调）的感知。结果表明，前导句子的平均基频（f0）会影响曲折调词汇声调的感知，且这种影响是对比性的。在一个平均f0较高的句子之后，接下来的音节更有可能被感知为较低频率的词汇声调，反之亦然。此外，模拟f0平均频谱的非语音前导音也会引发这种效应，这表明是一般的感知处理，而非基于发音或说话者身份驱动的机制。
