Mandarin Tone Perception with Temporal Envelope and Periodicity Cues from Different Frequency Regions

Temporal envelope and periodicity cues (TEPC) are crucial for speech perception of hearing-impaired people who have poor frequency selectivity. This paper investigates the contributions of TEPCs extracted from different frequency regions to lexical tone perception of Mandarin. Tone identification tests were carried out with tone-contrasting monosyllabic and disyllabic words. Normal- hearing subjects were recruited in the psychoacoustic experiments with acoustic stimuli that simulate the output of a cochlear implant. The results show that tone identification accuracy with sub-band TEPCs is consistently higher for male voice than for female voice. TEPCs from sub-bands above 1 kHz are found to contribute more to tone identification than those from sub-bands below 1 kHz, especially for male voice. Tone recognition performance can be improved by simply removing the low-frequency TEPCs. The same findings were obtained in our previous study on Cantonese tone perception. This suggests that emphasizing high-frequency TEPCs may be an effective strategy to improve speech perception of tonal languages.