PERCEPTUAL DIMENSIONS OF TONE: EVIDENCE FROM CANTONESE

Jack Gandour

《Journal of Chinese Linguistics》 9卷1期 (1981/01) Pp. 20-36

摘要

A multidimensional scaling reanalysis of the Fok (1974) tone confusion data from Cantonese revealed three underlying perceptual dimensions that were interpretively labeled CONTOUR, DIRECTION, and HEIGHT, respectively. The influence of a Cantonese tone sandhi rule on a listener's tonal perception was evident in the position of the high-falling tone (1) on the CONTOUR dimension. The weights of these dimensions were not found to vary much across the different kinds of tonal stimuli - natural speech tones, natural larynx tones, and synthetic larynx tones. These dimensions extracted from the patterns of tonal confusions in Cantonese were found to bear close resemblance to perceptual dimensions of tone that have emerged in other multidimensional scaling investigations.