Categorical Perception of Mandarin Chinese Tones 1-2 and Tones 1-4: Effects of Aging and Signal Duration

• Published in: Journal of speech, language, and hearing research Vol. 60; no. 12; pp. 3667 - 3677
• Main Authors: Wang, Yuxia, Yang, Xiaohu, Liu, Chang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 01.12.2017
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation - methods; Adult; Age Differences; Age effects; Age Factors; Aged; Aging; Aging (Biology); Aging (Individuals); Asian Continental Ancestry Group - psychology; Auditory Perception; Auditory Stimuli; Categorical perception; China; Chinese language; Chinese languages; Comparative Analysis; Cues; Experiments; Female; Fundamental frequency; Hearing; Hearing Impairments; Humans; Intonation; Language Enrichment; Linguistic research; Listening; Listening comprehension; Male; Mandarin; Mandarin Chinese; Middle Aged; National Standards; Phonetics; Pitch Perception - physiology; Psychological aspects; Speech; Speech duration; Speech perception; Speech Perception - physiology; Stimuli; Temporal processing; Tone; Tone (Phonetics); Young Adult
• ISSN: 1092-4388; 1558-9102
• DOI: 10.1044/2017_JSLHR-H-17-0061

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the aging effect on the categorical perception of Mandarin Chinese tones with varied fundamental frequency (F0) contours and signal duration. Method: Both younger and older native Chinese listeners with normal hearing were recruited in 2 experiments--tone identification and tone discrimination on a series of stimuli with the F0 contour systematically varying from the flat tone to the rising-falling tones. Apart from F0 contour, tone duration was manipulated at 3 levels: 100, 200, and 400 ms. Results: Results suggested that, compared with younger listeners, older listeners performed with shallower slope in the identification function and smaller peakedness in the discrimination function, particularly for Tones 1 and 2, whereas for Tones 1 and 4, comparable categorical perception was found between younger and older listeners. Conclusions: The current study suggested that longer duration facilitated categorical perception in the flat-rising tones for the older listeners. Such an aging effect was not found with the flat-falling tones, suggesting that the aging-related deficit in categorical perception might relate to different tone types. Aging resulted in less categoricality of Mandarin tone perception for the flat-rising tones with short duration like 100 ms, possibly due to the aging-related decline in temporal processing.