title: Sine-wave speech recognition in a tonal language.
abstract: It is hypothesized that in sine-wave replicas of natural speech, lexical tone recognition would be severely impaired due to the loss of F0 information, but the linguistic information at the sentence level could be retrieved even with limited tone information. Forty-one native Mandarin-Chinese-speaking listeners participated in the experiments. Results showed that sine-wave tone-recognition performance was on average only 32.7% correct. However, sine-wave sentence-recognition performance was very accurate, approximately 92% correct on average. Therefore the functional load of lexical tones on sentence recognition is limited, and the high-level recognition of sine-wave sentences is likely attributed to the perceptual organization that is influenced by top-down processes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology, Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital, Institute of Otolaryngology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200233, People's Republic of China. yanmeifeng2008@gmail.com
authors.forename: Yan-Mei
authors.initials: YM
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.forename: Li
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Guang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Shan-Kai
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Yin
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002681:China; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult