5 Discussion
This paper examined the perception of two Mandarin tone contrasts by speakers who differ in their experience with linguistic tone. Native language background was found to be one of the most influential factors in tone categorization. The Mandarin listeners outperformed the English listeners in the categorization of the Mandarin tones, especially with the T1/T4 contrast. The English listeners, on the other hand, failed to categorize the Mandarin tone contrasts despite the presence of high discrimination levels.
Mandarin and English listeners both perceived the T2/T3 contrast non-categorically. The inability of the Mandarin speakers to categorize this native tone contrast may have been caused by the partial loss of perceptual cues. According to Shen and Lin (1990) and Blicher et al. (1990), the period from the tonal onset to the turning point and the location of the turning point are crucial cues that distinguish T2 and T3. While the synthesized T2 and T3 used in this study retain the majority of the F0 information available in natural speech, the critical cues noted above were not present.