Age, babble noise, and working memory have been found to affect the recognition of emotional prosody based on non-tonal languages, yet little is known about how exactly they influence tone-language-speaking children's recognition of emotional prosody. In virtue of the tectonic theory of Stroop effects and the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU)…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the aging effects on the categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical Tones 1-4 and Tones 1-2 in noise. It also investigated whether listeners' categorical tone perception in noise correlated with their general tone identification of 20 natural vowel-plus-tone signals in noise. Method: Twelve…

As an information-bearing auditory attribute of sound, pitch plays a crucial role in the perception of speech and music. Studies examining pitch processing in autism spectrum disorder have produced equivocal results. To understand this discrepancy from a mechanistic perspective, we used a novel data-driven method, the reverse-correlation paradigm,…

Purpose: This study investigated the categorical perception of Mandarin tones and consonant aspiration contrasts in babble noise among adults and adolescents aged 12-14 years, and explored the association between working memory and categorical perception. Method: Twenty-four adults and 20 adolescents with Mandarin as their native language were…

Classic typologies within prosody tend to treat 'tone' languages as being diametrically opposed to 'stress' languages. However, Hyman (2006) highlights several languages that can have both, including Seneca, Fasu, and Copala Trique. As language documentation advances and our acoustic methodologies in the field are further refined, we have seen…

Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody--the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud--predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades…

Purpose: This study explored the neural marker indexing deficits in discriminating lexical tone changes in Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) using mismatch negativity, an event-related potential component for auditory change detection. Mandarin has four lexical tones characterized by a high-level tone (T1),…

The current study examined the phonolexical processing of Mandarin segments and tones by English speakers at different Mandarin proficiency levels. Eleven English speakers naive to Mandarin, 15 intermediate and 9 advanced second language (L2) learners participated in a word-learning experiment. After learning the sound and meaning of 16 Mandarin…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effects of dysphonic voice on speech intelligibility in Cantonese-speaking adults. Method: Speech recordings from three speakers with dysphonia secondary to phonotrauma and three speakers with healthy voices were presented to 30 healthy listeners (15 men and 15 women; M[subscript age] = 22.7 years) under…

This study is a case study of the effects of tonal L1 on the acquisition of tonal L2, comparing two groups of tonal L1 learners, namely, Chinese Zhuang (C+Z) and Chinese non-Zhuang (C-Z) in the same classroom. The two groups of learners read aloud 60 words from a Thai wordlist, then their tone production was analyzed in two dimensions. The…

Purpose: Previous studies have shown enhanced pitch and impaired time perception in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether such deviated patterns of auditory processing depending on acoustic dimensions would transfer to the higher level linguistic pitch and time processing. In this study, we compared…

Purpose: Although acquisition of Chinese lexical tones by second language (L2) learners has been intensively investigated, very few studies focused on categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones by highly proficient L2 learners. This study was designed to address this issue with behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Method: Behavioral…

Purpose: This study examined the acoustic properties of Taiwanese (Southern Min) lexical tones produced in esophageal speech (ES) and pneumatic artificial laryngeal speech (PAL), including onset fundamental frequency (F0), slope of F0 contour, duration, and amplitude (intensity) of the vowel portion of syllables carrying seven Taiwanese tones.…

Lexical tone languages like Mandarin Chinese require listeners to discriminate among different pitch patterns. A syllable spoken with a rising pitch (e.g. "b[i-acute]" 'nose') carries a different meaning than the same syllable spoken with a falling pitch (e.g. "b[i with grave]" 'arm'). For native speakers (L1) of a non-tonal…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic-phonemic normalization) were investigated through the…