Perception of Mandarin intonation

Abstract

This study investigates how tone and intonation, and how focus and intonation, interact in intonation type (statement versus question) identification. A perception experiment was conducted on a speech corpus of 1040 utterances. Sixteen listeners participated in the experiment. The results reveal three asymmetries: statement and question intonation identification; effects of the sentence-final Tone2 and Tone4 on question intonation identification; and effects of the final focus on statement and question intonation identification. These asymmetries suggest that: (1) statement intonation is a default or unmarked intonation type whereas question intonation is a marked intonation type; (2) question intonation has a higher prosodic strength at the sentence final position; (3) there is a tone-dependent mechanism of question intonation at the sentence-final position.