Effects of preceding vocabulary context on the perception of Mandarin vowels

Abstract

This study compares the perceptual performance of Mandarin basic vowels 'e' (//) and 'u' (/u/) in different contexts (independent & contextual). Results indicate that perception of the target vowel is influenced by the adjacent vowel context in a contrastive manner in both identification and discrimination tests. Moreover, in a context of higher F1 and F2, listeners found it more difficult to discriminate stimuli belonging to the /u/ category (which has lower F1 and F2), which may result from the effect of the referential formants of the context. Despite the influence of contextual factors, both // and /u/ in Mandarin showed relatively stable perception categories, and the perceived psychological parameters were consistent with the measured acoustic values Wu Zongji (1964) found for the Mandarin vowels // and /u/.