Perceptual Salience of Tones, Vowels, and Consonants in Mandarin Speech Errors

• Published in: Language and speech Vol. 68; no. 3; pp. 495 - 511
• Main Authors: Liu, Zifeng, Chitoran, Ioana, Turco, Giuseppina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.09.2025; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Consonants; Hypotheses; Mandarin; Phonemes; Phonology; Reaction time; Salience; Speech errors; Speech perception; Tone; Vowels; V-bias; speech error; speech perception; word reconstruction; Tone

The present study examines the perceptual salience of tonal speech errors compared with segmental errors (consonant and vowel). Tonal errors are observed less often than segmental errors. We thus hypothesize that tone errors are more easily ignored during transcription tasks because tones may have l...