Perception of intonation in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

There is a tendency across languages to use a rising pitch contour to convey question intonation and a falling pitch contour to convey a statement. In a lexical tone language such as Mandarin Chinese, rising and falling pitch contours are also used to differentiate lexical meaning. How, then, does the multiplexing of the F(0) channel affect the perception of question and statement intonation in a lexical tone language? This study investigated the effects of lexical tones and focus on the perception of intonation in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that lexical tones and focus impact the perception of sentence intonation. Question intonation was easier for native speakers to identify on a sentence with a final falling tone and more difficult to identify on a sentence with a final rising tone, suggesting that tone identification intervenes in the mapping of F(0) contours to intonational categories and that tone and intonation interact at the phonological level. In contrast, there is no evidence that the interaction between focus and intonation goes beyond the psychoacoustic level. The results provide insights that will be useful for further research on tone and intonation interactions in both acoustic modeling studies and neurobiological studies.

Online processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin: Evidence from ERPs

“…For statement intonation identification, statements ending with Tone4 showed a significantly higher identification rate (99.3%) than statements ending with Tone2 (91.3%). These results are in line with previous studies (Xu and Mok, 2012;Yuan, 2011). However, our results concerning question intonation identification were different from what was reported in Yuan (2011).…”

“…Results showed an MMN for the tone deviant but not for the intonation deviant. As the MMN is linked to higher order perceptual processes underlying stimulus discrimination (Pulvermüller and Shtyrov, 2006), the above two studies suggest that at the pre-attentive stage, native listeners can tease apart question intonation from statement intonation when the intonation is combined with Tone4, but they are not able to tease apart the two types of intonation when the intonation is combined with Tone2, just as what Yuan (2011) has reported with behavioral perceptual judgment data. This correspondence of the online MMN results with the offline behavioral results validates the initial ERP evidence of the interaction of tone and intonation in Mandarin.…”

“…From this line of reasoning, with a final Tone4, question intonation seems to be evaluated as possessing target-like properties, whereas statement intonation is evaluated as possessing non-target-like properties. Interestingly, this assumption happens to coincide with the view that statement intonation is a default intonation type and question intonation is a marked intonation type (Peters and Pfitzinger, 2008;Yuan, 2011). It appears that as a default intonation type, statement intonation occupies less mental attention or effort to be identified, leading to attenuated or even diminished P300 amplitude.…”

“…Two alternative views have been established. One holds that there is an overall F0 rising of sentences in questions compared to statements (Ho, 1977;Shen, 1989;Yuan, 2011). The other claims that the F0 difference between questions and statements is more pronounced towards the end of the sentences (Kratochvil, 1998;Liu and Xu, 2005;Xu, 2005;Peng et al, 2005).…”

“…Tone identity maintains in question intonation. With regard to the effect of tone on intonation perception, Yuan (2011) found that in Mandarin, questions ending with Tone4 (falling tone) were easier to identify than questions ending with Tone2 (rising tone). Three mechanisms were proposed for question intonation: an overall higher phrase curve, higher strengths of sentence-final tones and a tone-dependent mechanism.…”