title: The roles of fundamental frequency contours and sentence context in Mandarin Chinese speech intelligibility.
abstract: Flattening the fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Mandarin Chinese sentences reduces their intelligibility in noise but not in quiet. It is unclear, however, how the absence of primary acoustic cue for lexical tones might be compensated with the top-down information of sentence context. In this study, speech intelligibility was evaluated when participants listened to sentences and word lists with or without F0 variations in quiet and noise. The results showed that sentence context partially explained the unchanged intelligibility of monotonous Chinese sentences in quiet and further indicate that F0 variations and sentence context act in concert during speech comprehension.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China. wangjiuju@gmail.com
authors.forename: Jiuju
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Hua
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Shu
authors.forename: Linjun
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Zhaoxing
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult