Work

Sine-wave speech recognition in a tonal language

Year: 2012

Type: article

Abstract: It is hypothesized that in sine-wave replicas of natural speech, lexical tone recognition would be severely impaired due to the loss of F0 information, but the linguistic information at the sentence level could be retrieved even with limited tone information. Forty-one native Mandarin-Chinese-speaking listeners participated in the experiments. Results showed that sine-wave tone-recognition performance was on average only 32.7% correct. However, sine-wave sentence-recognition performance was very accurate, approximately 92% correct on average. Therefore the functional load of lexical tones on sentence recognition is limited, and the high-level recognition of sine-wave sentences is likely attributed to the perceptual organization that is influenced by top-down processes.

Source: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

DOI: 10.1121/1.3670594

Authors: Yan-Mei Feng, Li Xu, Ning Zhou, Guang Yang, Shan-Kai Yin

Institutions: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital, Ohio University, University of Michigan

Language: English

Topic: Phonetics and Phonology Research

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

Award: Tone acquisition in young children with cochlear implants