Effects of prosodic and semantic contexts on Cantonese tone perception

Abstract

This study examined the effect of prosodic contexts on Cantonese tone perception and how the prosodic effect could be compensated by referencing to the F0 in the preceding linguistic context and by the provision of semantic cues. The study involved four context conditions: no semantic contexts (MW), neutral semantic contexts (NC), high congruent semantic contexts (HC) and incongruent semantic contexts (IC). In MW condition, the target stimuli were presented in isolation. In NC, HC and IC conditions, the same target stimuli were attached to the final position of semantically neutral carriers, semantically related carriers and semantically incongruent carriers, respectively. Results revealed that there was a prosodic effect on the perception of level tones but not the rising tones. Listeners tended to lower the F0 of the category boundaries for the level tones when listening to the tones in utterance final position. This prosodic effect could be compensated by providing a mid-level tone as a reference or by the provision of semantic contexts. Similar results in NC and IC conditions revealed that the incongruent semantic context did not have a negative effect on level tone perception.