The Role of F0 in the Recognition of Aspiration Contrasts in Mandarin

The perturbation effect of fundamental frequency at vowel onset (i.e., onset f0) caused by the voicing distinction of preceding consonants was extensively explored across languages (hereafter as “CF0”, consonant-related f0 perturbations). The aspiration contrast mainly distinguished by vot is an important distinctive feature in Mandarin, which divides stops and affricates into two categories: aspirated and unaspirated. Although CF0 due to the aspiration contrast has been demonstrated in Mandarin, the role of f0 in the perception of aspiration contrast has received limited attention. The present study focused on the relative contribution of vot and onset f0 to the perception of aspirated consonants. A series of synthesized syllables that were orthogonally covarying in vot and onset f0 were created by manipulating a set of minimal pair that were identical in all features except for the aspiration. The results based on mixed-effects logistic regression model showed that the beta coefficients indicating the relative cue weighting of acoustic cues, were 3.41 for vot and 0.42 for onset f0, which suggested that although onset f0 contributed to the perception of aspirated sounds, vot was still a robust determinant. Moreover, the weighting of onset f0 was associated with the transition duration. When the onset f0 changed linearly from the onset to the steady-state f0 of voicing over the first 50ms, the weighting of onset f0 increased from 0.42 to 0.74.