A study on Mandarin tone perception of native speakers of Anduo based on E-Prime

Categorical perception is an important speech perception model, which means that the continuum of speech stimulus is perceived as discrete, limited number of categories, namely phonemes. The opposite of category perception is continuous perception, in which the participant cannot perceive the speech stimulus as discrete and limited categories. The study of categorical perception of speech began in the Haskins laboratory. The classical task paradigm of phonological categorical perception is the recognition experiment and distinction experiment proposed by Liberman et al in 1957. E-Prime is an experiment-generation system for computerized behavioral research developed by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning, Research and Development and Psychology Software Tools. It is a cross-platform system, a suite of GUI applications that covers everything from lab generation to millisecond precision data collection and preliminary analysis. Its characteristic is the graphical interface programming environment, makes the programming simple. This paper uses the experimental phonetics method to study the Anduo native speakers' perceptual patterns of Mandarin tones. The results showed that they had categorical perception of the tonal continuum T1-T2, T1-T4, T2-T4, and T3-T4 in Mandarin, T1-T3 continuum belongs to quasi category perception, and the T2- T3 continuum belongs to neither continuous perception nor categorical perception. It also found that native speakers of Anduo were more likely to judge the tones they heard as falling.