摘要
The research aim is to investigate that how pitch and duration affect the perception of the neutral tone in standard Chinese and that which one of the two factors is more important. A psycho-acoustic experiment was conducted, in which the listening stimuli consisted of 15 groups of disyllabic words, and the pitches and durations of the two syllables in each of the words were artificially controlled. Thirty-three standard Chinese native speakers participated in a forced-choice task to judge if the second syllables of the words they heard carried the neutral tone or the normal tones. The results of the experiment indicated that, （1） the effects of both pitch and duration on the perception of the neutral tone are significant; （2） the effect of pitch is larger than that of duration; （3） both the F0 values of the high point in the pitch contour and the pitch contour pattern have influence on the perception. The results of the experiment were correspondent to some extent to those of the previous acoustic analyses on the neutral tone. The diversity between the results of the presented perceptual study and those of the acoustical studies implies that the acoustic features of the neutral tone that exist in natural speech while do not affect the perception may be phonologically redundant.
The research aim is to investigate that how pitch and duration affect the perception of the neutral tone in standard Chinese and that which one of the two factors is more important. A psycho-acoustic experiment was conducted, in which the listening stimuli consisted of 15 groups of disyllabic words, and the pitches and durations of the two syllables in each of the words were artificially controlled. Thirty-three standard Chinese native speakers participated in a forced-choice task to judge if the second syllables of the words they heard carried the neutral tone or the normal tones. The results of the experiment indicated that, （1） the effects of both pitch and duration on the perception of the neutral tone are significant; （2） the effect of pitch is larger than that of duration; （3） both the F0 values of the high point in the pitch contour and the pitch contour pattern have influence on the perception. The results of the experiment were correspondent to some extent to those of the previous acoustic analyses on the neutral tone. The diversity between the results of the presented perceptual study and those of the acoustical studies implies that the acoustic features of the neutral tone that exist in natural speech while do not affect the perception may be phonologically redundant.
基金
This work was supported by National Ministry of Education, grant in humanity and social sciences 01JC740007, the 8th Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation grant 81092, and NOCFL grant HBK 01-05/013.
