The recognition of neutral tone across acoustic cues

In Standard Chinese, both F₀ and duration are the important acoustic cues for neutral tone perception. The present study focuses on the acoustic cues that contribute to neutral tone perception by checking the interplay between acoustic cues and other factors, including lexical status, the underlying tones. Manipulations were conducted according to different acoustic cues, obtaining three conditions: duration (D), F₀ (P), or both duration and F₀ (DP). The results showed that 1) both duration and F₀ are necessary for neutral tone perception; 2) although F₀ is the most reliable cue, the F₀ alone is not sufficient for neutral tone identification; 3) real and pseudo words are different, which probably represent distinctive processing mechanisms in language networks; 4) duration serves as a more reliable cue than F₀ when the underlying tone is T3; 5) paradigm effect was found in P condition: F₀ showed more reliability in ABX paradigm.