Conference Paper Published

Abstract

The phonetic description and phonological analysis of Mandarin Tone 3 has been a complex issue that attracted divergent views. To better understand this tone, the current study has computed the mental representation of Tone 3 by adopting the reverse-correlation paradigm. Thirty participants (15 males, mean age = 21.94 ± 2.4 years) were recruited to compare and judge which of the two randomly generated stimuli sounded more like Tone 3. Analyses on the interaction between participants’ response and the manipulated random contour in perception of this tone has indicated that mental representation of Mandarin Tone 3 reflected some of the phonological representations (i.e., the [+low] feature) as well as preserving the phonetic characteristics (i.e., contourisity, dynamic and static portions, and durationdependency). This method has offered possibilities to better understand the nature of linguistic elements in an integrated way.