Perceptual preference for falling tones over rising tones: A study of Mandarin Chinese
Yuyu Zeng, Allard Jongman, Joan A. Sereno, Jie Zhang · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2019
Typological studies have shown that there are more falling tones than rising tones in tone languages, including Chinese. We test the hypothesis that this may be due to a perceptually-based advantage for falling tones over rising tones. Two acoustically comparable (and matched for naturalness) tonal continua in Mandarin (level-falling T1-T4, and level-rising T1-T2) were created. Identification and discrimination results were obtained from 14 native Mandarin speakers. The results revealed that it is easier to identify a falling tone than a rising tone; that is, listeners require a smaller F0 difference between onset and offset to distinguish a falling tone from a level tone as compared to a rising tone from a level tone. Additionally, there are several hints of better discrimination for the falling continuum. This disagrees with our and others’ Mandarin production data, which show that the rising tone is closer to the level tone than the falling tone is, hence a production-perception dissociation. We propose that, historically, Chinese listeners’ greater sensitivity to the level-falling contrast has resulted in the preponderance of falling tones over rising tones found across Chinese languages, and this proposed explanation may be applicable to other tone languages as well.