Understanding Periodically Interrupted Mandarin Speech

This study investigated the effects of two parameters (i.e., interruption rate, and duty cycle of interruption) on the perception of periodically interrupted Mandarin speech. Normal-hearing listeners were instructed to identify consonant/vowel/tone/word from isolated Mandarin words and recognize Mandarin sentences when they were temporally interrupted by square wave. Results showed that consistent with earlier findings obtained with English speech, interruption with a large rate or duty cycle favored the perception of periodically interrupted Mandarin speech. In addition, for isolated Mandarin word, the perception of vowel or tone was less affected by periodical interruption than that of consonant, and under periodical interruption the perception of consonant could largely account for the recognition of Mandarin word. For Mandarin sentence, the tonal characteristics and the simpler syllable structure in Mandarin might facilitate spectral-temporal integration of the target words, which contributed to a sentence intelligibility advantage of Mandarin over English under interrupted