Book Title

Phonetic Constancy in the Perception of Chinese Tones

Author

Zhang Caicai (Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies)

Publisher

Chinese University Press of Hong Kong

Year of Publication

2018

ISSN

2409-2878

Introduction

How humans achieve constancy in the perception of an object (e.g., the size, color and brightness of a visual object) despite variations in its physical appearance is a fundamental question in human cognition. In speech perception, phonetic constancy, e.g., the ability to recognize a speech sound produced by different talkers as the same one despite acoustic variations, is also critical. Multiple mechanisms have been identified in the literature to account for phonetic constancy based primarily on studies of the perception of consonants and vowels. For instance, the intrinsic normalization mechanism suggests that critical acoustic cues of a speech sound (e.g., F0) are rescaled/transformed against other cues indicative of a talker’s voice characteristics (e.g., voice quality) intrinsically contained in the speech target to reduce variation. On the other hand, the extrinsic normalization mechanism emphasizes the importance of extrinsic cues, e.g., a speech context. According to this mechanism, listeners adapt to a particular talker’s voice via the distribution of acoustic cues in the surrounding context. However, few studies have examined the perception of lexical tones, which are highly susceptible to the influence of talker variation. As a result, it is not very clear what mechanisms support the perceptual normalization of tones and to what extent those mechanisms proposed based on consonant and vowel studies apply to tones. Furthermore, neuroimaging studies on phonetic constancy are relatively scarce, and the neural signatures of the normalization processes remain largely unknown. In this monograph, the author reported a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies conducted to examine the psychological mechanisms and neural processes of talker normalization, using Chinese tones as an investigation case. With these studies and related work in the literature, an understanding of how phonetic constancy is achieved in lexical tone perception is emerging.

* Owners of respective book covers are credited. Book covers are for reference only. FH is unable to accept responsibility of any inaccurate information.