The role of spectro-temporal fine structure cues in lexical-tone discrimination for French and Mandarin listeners

The role of spectro-temporal modulation cues in conveying tonal information for lexical tones was assessed in native-Mandarin and native-French adult listeners using a lexical-tone discrimination task. The fundamental frequency (F0) of Thai tones was either degraded using an 8-band vocoder that redu...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2014-08, Vol.136 (2), p.877-882
Main Authors: Cabrera, Laurianne, Tsao, Feng-Ming, Gnansia, Dan, Bertoncini, Josiane, Lorenzi, Christian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Adult
Audiometry, Speech
Cognitive science
Cues
Discrimination (Psychology)
Female
Humans
Male
Phonetics
Pitch Discrimination
Psychology
Sound Spectrography
Speech Perception
Time Factors
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The role of spectro-temporal modulation cues in conveying tonal information for lexical tones was assessed in native-Mandarin and native-French adult listeners using a lexical-tone discrimination task. The fundamental frequency (F0) of Thai tones was either degraded using an 8-band vocoder that reduced fine spectral details and frequency-modulation cues, or extracted and used to modulate the F0 of click trains. Mandarin listeners scored lower than French listeners in the discrimination of vocoded lexical tones. For click trains, Mandarin listeners outperformed French listeners. These preliminary results suggest that the perceptual weight of the fine spectro-temporal modulation cues conveying F0 information is enhanced for adults speaking a tonal language.
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.4887444