Lecture Title: A Study on Categorical Perception of Mandarin Tones Based on Acoustic Features

Speaker: Zhu Hong (Associate Professor, Master’s Supervisor)

Time: Friday, May 30, 2025, 10:20–11:20

Venue: Room 7-210, Building 7, BinhaiCentral Campus, TUST

All faculty members and students are warmly welcome!

Speaker Introduction:

Zhu Hong is an associate professor and master’s supervisor at Jiangnan University. Her research focuses on psycholinguistics and Japanese-Chinese translation. She has led one National Social Science Fund Project for Translation of Chinese Academic Works and one Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project, and participated in one national-level and one Ministry of Education social science project. She has published one academic monograph, one translation, and one textbook. She has also authored multiple high-level research papers in journals such as Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Modern Foreign Languages, and Japanese Language Learning and Research.

Lecture Content:

Understanding the relationship between acoustic parameters and perceptual patterns serves as a critical link connecting speech production, acoustic transmission, and auditory cognition. This study investigates the tone identification patterns of Mandarin’s four tones—specifically the recognition of the first (high-level) and fourth (falling) tones, and the second (rising) and third (falling-rising) tones—based on their acoustic characteristics. Identification and discrimination experiments were conducted with both native Mandarin speakers and Japanese learners of Chinese. The results show that when the endpoint fundamental frequency (F0) is used as the parameter, both Japanese learners and native speakers exhibit categorical perception for the first and fourth tones. When ΔF0 (pitch slope) and turning point time are used as parameters, both groups demonstrate a tendency toward categorical perception for the second and third tones, with their categorical perception ability improving as their proficiency in Chinese increases. These findings indicate that key acoustic parameters are crucial clues for understanding the perception patterns of Mandarin tones, offering significant implications for tone error correction training for Chinese language learners, speech disorder rehabilitation for native speakers, and forensic voice analysis.

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