Tone Perception

As everyone knows, Chinese is the most distinguished member among contour tone languages for its numerous variants of contours in not only citation tones but also tone sandhi. After a long period of research, questions still remain. Which one, among FO contour, time and intensity, is the most important feature in perception? Is the glottal stop ending and murmur, in Shanghai dialect as well as in most Wu dialect, phonemic? However, so far we don't have a thorough research on the categorical perception of Chinese tones, although tone features in some dialects such as Shanghai dialect has been aimed by research on autosegmental phonology. We tried our best by this study to change that kind of situation and answer the question raised above.The whole study is divided into 7 chapters. Before the text appears, we introduce many fundamental knowledge, information and data for background in introductory remarks.In the first chapter, we confirm the tonemic boundary between long and short citation tones and the glottal stop ending redundant feature can be derived by a [-long] feature. Furthermore, we suggest introducing a symbol into 5-degree scale to distinguish long and short tones. In chapter2, we discuss the difference and conclude that the identification and discrimination of different citation tones depend on the accomplishment of A F between the tonemic boundary. In chapter3, 2 more dialects, Putonghua and Fanshan dialect are added into the research view. Besides, we probe that Putonghua has two level tones, which are continuous perceived by high and low register. In chapter4, the term so-called "Qin Yin Zhuo Liu", first defined by Chao, YuenRen, which means there is a set of special voiceless consonant in Shanghai phonology actually followed by a voiced aspiration proved to be redundant. In chapter5, we first find that there are two different kinds of convex tones in Chinese dialects. One is like that in Putonghua, all parts of the convex tone are tone-distinguishing. Another kind is like that in Shanghai and Fanshan, only the latter part of the real rising tone is functional in identification and discrimination. We also check out the accurate boundary value between different convex tone and level tone, such as the delayed falling version and the straight falling version of the first tone in Shanghai dialect. In chapter6, we conclude that the intensity feature play least important role in tone perception. After then, we check our conclusions by sampling and analyzing in different scales.We finally summarize the findings in whole article and probe it in theoretical interest in the last chapter.This study has produced and provided the first perception-oriented investigation into citation tones in more than 3 dialects of Chinese, Shanghai dialect, Putonghua and Fanshan dialect, supplying a gap that almost no one enters the same research field in mainland China. Recent trend shows that modern linguistics is tend to combine phonetics and phonology to make better and more convincible achievements. May this article contribute something useful to tonetics, tonemics and tonology.