Perceiving Vowels and Tones in Mandarin: The Effect of Literary Phonetic Systems on Phonological Awareness

A tone-vowel monitoring task similar to Ye and Connine’s (1999) experiment was conducted in Taiwan to examine how literary phonetic systems affect people’s perception of vowels, and then the relative temporal availability of vowel and tonal information. The results demonstrated that although participants were sensitive to the acoustic nature of monosyllablic stimuli, they mainly resorted to the literary systems they learned during the perception. Therefore, the impact of literary systems on the perception was taken into consideration when the relation of vowels and tones was investigated in this study. With the consideration, it was found that vowel information was available relatively earlier than the tonal information.