Representing Tone in Onomatopoeic Expressions

My research seeks to clarify what specific acoustic properties that humans use to represent sounds in onomatopoeia, in the specific domain of tone. A wealth of research (Tanaka et al. 1995, Yamauchi et al. 2003, Yamauchi and Iwamiya 2005, and Matsui 2020, etc.) has find that, when representing pure tones as onomatopoeia, native Japanese speakers will use F2 as a proxy for f0. This has also been found to be true of native Mandarin speakers (Matsui 2020). Yet, it has not been determined whether this is also true of speakers of a non-tonal langauge, like English, and whether this association is one sided. My ongoing study will be conducted on 30 native English speakers and 30 native Mandarin speakers. In the first part, which reuses the methodology of existing research, participants will be asked to listen to pure tones of 62.5, 125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, and 8000 Hz and represent them as an onomatopoeia. In the second part, which will be administered only to Mandarin speakers, participants will undergo a 2-AFC task where they must categorize tokens from a tonal minimal pair. All of the tokens have been high-pass filtered to obscure tone and have F2 altered to be higher or lower than normal. Preliminary results indicate that English speakers do use F2 as a proxy for f0.