Relative contributions of vowels and consonants in recognizing isolated Mandarin words

Abstract

This study investigated the relative contributions of vowels and consonants in recognizing isolated Mandarin words. Nineteen normal-hearing native speakers of Mandarin were recruited and were asked to recognize isolated Mandarin words with different proportions of consonant or vowel segment preserved. The accuracy in recognizing the isolated Mandarin words, phonemes, and tones were scored. It is found that there is a greater contribution of vowels than consonants to isolated word recognition in Mandarin, which is different from previous outcomes in English. Possible reasons for this language difference in isolated word recognition were discussed. Contribution of consonant-vowel transitional boundary to isolated word recognition in Mandarin was also examined. It is found that the word recognition performance improves with increased amount of consonant-vowel boundary information presented.