Effects of preceding contexts on the categorical perception of Mandarin tones

Tone perception is not only based on word-internal F0 cues but also with reference to F0 cues in the contexts. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of preceding contexts on Mandarin tone perception. In the experiment, Mandarin Tone 1 and Tone 2 (high-level and mid-rising) were investigated with preceding four types of contexts (normal speech, reversal speech, fine-structure sound and nonspeech) by manipulating the contextual mean F0. Results indicate that the Mandarin tones are restrictedly influenced only by the normal speech context and the effect is contrastive. With normal speech context with a higher mean F0, the following tone continuum is more likely to be perceived as a lower-frequency tone (Tone 2) and vice versa. These findings suggest that Mandarin tone normalization may be mediated by a speech-specific process and the context needs to be phonologically meaningful.