Mandarin Lexical Tone Recognition: The Gating Paradigm

Research on spoken word recognition in Indo-European languages often does not incorporate prosody. In Mandarin Chinese, however, lexical prosody is used extensively and has been shown to affect word processing in previous studies. The present study uses the gating paradigm to investigate the processing of the four Mandarin tones as well as the role of the initial segment in processing. Duration-blocked gates generated from eight monosyllabic quadruplets with matching frequencies of occurrence were used as stimuli. To evaluate the effect of the initial segment, the initial consonant of each syllable always formed the first gate, with later gates formed by 40ms increments. Results showed that Tone 1 has a significantly earlier Isolation Point (IP) than Tone 4, which has an earlier IP than Tones 2 and 3. Sonorant-initial syllables have an earlier IP than obstruent-initial syllables, but further analyses of covariance indicated that IP covariates with the duration of the initial consonant. The tone responses proposed by the participants before reaching the IP were cross-examined with the acoustic features of the four tones. The results indicated that high register cues are more prominent than low register cues, as high tones were never misidentified as low tones. Moreover, contour information outweighs low register cues, as low-onset tones were sometimes misidentified as high-onset tones with which they share similar contours. These results provide more detailed temporal information about tone processing for Mandarin.