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Just noticeable difference of tone pitch contour change for English- and Chinese-native listeners
Abstract
Just noticeable differences of tone pitch contour discrimination were examined for young English- and Mandarin Chinese-native listeners to examine categorical features of tone perception for the two groups of listeners. Three types of stimuli were used: A Mandarin Chinese vowel, an English vowel, and tonal glides. Level, rising, and falling tones within or across tone boundaries served as the standard stimuli to measure thresholds of tone pitch discrimination. Performance was equivalent between English- and Chinese-native listeners for level tones, but significantly differed for rising and falling tones, regardless of the type of stimuli. English listeners showed significantly lower thresholds at the offset of F0 shifts than Chinese listeners, while Chinese listeners discriminated tone pitch changes at the onset with significantly lower thresholds than their English peers. These psychophysical results, combined with tone perception reported in other studies, indicated that Mandarin-native listeners perceived lexical tones in a categorical manner, based on their lexical tone experience, whereas English-native listeners perceived tones on a psychophysical base.
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Metadata
- Authors
- Liu, C.
- Affiliations
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
- Corresponding author
- Liu, Chang
- ORCID
- Liu, Chang
- Venue
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Publisher
- Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
- Published
- 2013-10-01
- Volume
- 134
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 3011-3020
- ISSN
- 0001-4966 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-8524
- OpenAlex
- W2013066122
- Cited by
- 47
- References
- 18
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 2
- FWCI
- 4.93
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Music Perception
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
- Keywords
- just noticeable difference, tone perception, categorical perception, Mandarin Chinese, rising and falling tones, fundamental frequency shift, cross-linguistic perception
- MeSH terms
- Acoustic Stimulation, Adult, Audiometry, Pure-Tone, Audiometry, Speech, Auditory Threshold, Female, Humans, Male, Phonetics, Pitch Perception, Psychoacoustics, Sound Spectrography, Speech Acoustics, Time Factors, Voice Quality, Multilingualism, Young Adult
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