A central question concerns whether interrogative marking overrides or interacts with lexical tone. This study investigates how interrogative meaning is realized in Mandarin declarative questions, examining both fundamental frequency (F0) trajectories and syllable duration across lexical tones. Four Mandarin tones were elicited in short and long sentences under declarative statement and declarative question conditions and analyzed using generalized additive mixed models and linear mixed-effects models. Results show that interrogatives exhibit elevated F0 relative to declaratives, with the strongest divergence occurring at the sentence-final syllable. Crucially, interrogative marking is tone-sensitive. Tone 1 shows register raising and final contour modification; Tones 2 and 3 exhibit enhancement of their rising components while preserving tonal minima; and Tone 4 maintains its falling contour despite global pitch elevation. These findings indicate that interrogative prosody modulates rather than neutralizes lexical tonal identity. Duration analysis further reveals tone-dependent temporal organization. In long sentences, interrogatives show significant final-syllable lengthening for Tones 2-4 but not for Tone 1. Interrogative marking therefore involves coordinated modulation of pitch and timing, with maximal enhancement at the prosodic right edge. The findings support a hierarchical view of interrogative prosody in Mandarin under tonal constraints.
Is aspiration part of the preceding consonant, part of the following vowel, or both? It behaves in many ways like part of the consonant which it is marked as occurring on, but it also contributes to listeners' perception of vowel duration. Previous work shows that vowels are perceived as longer following an aspirated stop than following an unaspirated stop (i.e. a cross-category effect). The current study tests whether within-category VOT manipulations of aspirated stops impact English speakers' perception of vowel duration. Vowels were more often identified as long when preceded by longer aspiration. The results are analyzed gesturally, following Articulatory Phonology: Listeners perceive an earlier beginning of the vowel gesture when the aspiration is longer. Because the vowel gesture begins before the end of aspiration, lengthening the VOT in a stimulus lengthens the apparent vowel gesture. This representation of aspiration also has implications for stimulus design.
Most Japanese dialects, including the standard Tokyo variety, employ a lexical tonal system, whereas certain dialects, referred to as accentless dialects, lack such a system. Although dialectological research has frequently suggested that younger speakers in accentless regions have acquired the standard tonal system through dialect standardization, evidence from perception studies indicates that these distinctions may not yet be fully established. The present study investigates whether the acquisition of the standard tonal system among speakers of accentless dialects is complete. We employed both evaluations of accentless dialect speakers' speech production by naive listeners and a sequence recall task designed to assess phonological contrasts in speech perception. Our findings demonstrate that the speech production of accentless dialect speakers closely resembled that of standard Japanese speakers and was often indistinguishable to naïve listeners, consistent with previous claims of complete standardization. However, the perception experiment revealed significantly poorer performance among accentless dialect speakers in discriminating lexical pitch contrasts. These results suggest that the standardization of accentless dialects remains incomplete at the perceptual level, despite the apparent convergence in production. Moreover, the sequence recall task proved to be an effective tool for identifying subtle cases of incomplete acquisition in the standardization of dialects.
This study used a longitudinal quasi-experimental design to investigate the impact of explicit instruction on Mandarin EFL learners' ability to disambiguate English syntactic ambiguities. Two classes that showed no significant differences in either accuracy or prosodic parameters for resolving English relative clause attachment ambiguity at pretest were randomly designated to an experimental group (n = 34) or a control group (n = 32). The experimental group received an explicit phonetic instruction over six months, whereas the control group received an implicit instruction. Follow-up assessments were conducted at six months to evaluate participants' disambiguation accuracy and prosodic performance when reading English relative clauses. The data indicated that the experimental group, which employed distinct prosodic strategies, achieved a statistically significant (though modestly) higher accuracy than the control group in disambiguating English relative clauses. Furthermore, these group differences were maintained over the six-month period. The findings indicate that explicit prosodic instruction serves as a moderately effective pedagogical intervention for improving Mandarin EFL learners' ability to disambiguate English relative clauses, consistent with the revised Speech Learning Model.
Previous research on vocal politeness has primarily focused on the acoustic correlates of polite expression and has yielded divergent findings, leaving unclear how multiple acoustic cues contribute to politeness perception. To address this gap, we conducted both speech production and perception experiments. In the production experiment, multivariate analyses showed that polite and rude utterances conveying identical linguistic content could be reliably distinguished using 11 acoustic features, with timbre contributing most prominently, followed by speech rate, whereas f0 contributed least. In the perception experiment, speech stimuli were generated by morphing between polite and rude utterances, with f0, speech rate, and timbre independently manipulated while other features were held constant. Linear mixed-effects models fitted to politeness ratings revealed timbre as the most robust cue, speech rate as the least influential, and f0 contributions varying with speaker gender and morphing direction. Latent class mixed-effects models further indicated largely consistent cue-use patterns across listeners. Although based on a limited dataset, particularly in the perception experiment, these findings provide preliminary insights into the relative roles of acoustic features in the expression and perception of vocal politeness in Mandarin and support analysing politeness as a form of prosodic mitigation.
