Tone-Vowel Interaction In Prominence Perception Of Non-Neutral Tone Disyllabic Words In Mandarin Chinese

This thesis studies the tone-vowel interaction in prominence perception of disyllabic non-neutral prosodic words in Mandarin Chinese.The whole paper is divided into five chapters. In chapter one, the author gives an overview of the past studies in related academic fields and summarizes the results and conclusion of various phoneticians in regard to the prosodic hierarchy, the definition of prosodic words, accent types, the acoustic correlates of accent and stress and the stress allocation in prosodic words of Mandarin Chinese. In chapter two, the author carries out perception experiments on 4 categories of disyllabic words — Category1: words of same tones and same vowel height, Category2: words of same tones but different vowel height, Category3: words of same vowel height but different tones, and Category4: words of different vowel height and different tones. The perception results indicate that for words in categoryl, the intensity difference between high vowels and low vowels contributes to the prominence perception. For other categories, the tonal contrast between two syllables plays a significant role in prominence perception. In chapter three, the author makes the acoustic analysis of the phenomena existing in the above perception experiments. The factors concerned in his experiments include several intrinsic syllable properties, e.g. the pitch value and pitch contour contrast among the four lexicon tones, the duration and the intrinsic intensity of finals. In chapter four the author carries out a perception experiment on the disyllabic words of different grammatical structures to further prove his analytic results. The chapter five is a conclusion.