Boundaries of perception of long tones in taiwanese speech

Abstract

In this work we set out to investigate the fundamental frequency boundaries of perception of the Taiwanese long tones. We are interested in how the variations in fundamental frequency affect the perception of linguistic tones in Taiwanese speech. Our investigation is adopted from similar studies of tones in Mandarin speech. As opposed to Mandarin tones that can be perceived with little difficulty the seven Taiwanese tones have a more subtle structure and are consequently harder to perceive successfully. The experimental results in this paper allow us to quantify these perceptual boundaries. The experiments consisted of a perception test involving over 150 Taiwanese subjects where the task involved identifying the tone of the words played back in a random sequence. The stimuli consisted of a set of tone pairs and a selection of intermediate tone words obtained by linearly interpolating between the words of the tone pairs.