The Influence on Realization and Perception of Lexical Tones from Affricate's Aspiration

Consonants in /CV/ syllables usually have potential influence on onset fundamental frequency (i.e., onset f0) of succeeding vowels. Previous studies showed such effect with respect to the aspiration of stops with evidence from Mandarin, a tonal language. While few studies investigated the effect on onset f0 from the aspiration of affricates. The differences between stops and affricates in aspiration leave space for further investigations. We examined the effect of affricate’s aspiration on the realization of onset f0 of following vowels in the form of isolated syllables and continuous speech by reference to a minimal pair of syllables which differ only in aspiration. Besides, we conducted tone identification tests using two sets of tone continua based on the same minimal pair of syllables. Experimental results showed that the aspirated syllables increased the onset f0 of following vowels compared with unaspirated counterparts in both kinds of contexts. While the magnitude of differences varied with tones. And the perception results showed that aspirated syllables tended to be perceived as tones that have relative lower onset f0, which in turn supported the production result. The present study may have applications for speech identification and speech synthesis.