Pitch and duration as cues in perception of neutral tone under different Contexts in Standard Chinese

This paper conducted a psychoacoustic experiment to investigate the influence of pitch and duration on neutral tone perception and the distribution pattern of the perceptual spaces in three contexts, namely, isolation, on-focus and post-focus. A minimal pair differed in stress pattern was employed in this experiment, i.e., neutral tone word “***” /mo2ku0/ (mushroom, strong-weak) and its counterpart with normal stress “***” /mo2kul/ (magic ring, strong-strong). The stimulus continuum was achieved by systematical changes of the F0 and duration on the second syllable of /moku/ in three contexts. ANOVA and multinomial ordinal logistic analysis were conducted on the perceptual results and showed that the distribution of perceptual spaces varies in three contexts. For neutral tone perception, the pitch is always a more reliable cue than the duration. However, the amplitude of the influence of pitch and duration is closely related to the context. In isolation, the pitch is a stronger cue to neutral tone perception than the duration. In on-focus condition, the pitch is still a stronger cue than the duration, but less than that in isolation. Under post-focus condition, even though the pitch plays a slightly more significant role, the duration is quite important as well. The results showed that in a tone language, i.e., Standard Chinese, the way the two acoustic cues influence the perception of neutral tone is not an exact match to that in Indo-Euro languages such as Dutch and English.