Effects of preceding vocabulary context on the perception of Mandarin vowels

This study compares the perceptual performance of Mandarin basic vowels “e” (/ɤ/) and “u” (/u/) in different contexts (independent & contextual). Results indicate that perception of the target vowel is influenced by the adjacent vowel context in a contrastive manner in both identification and discrimination tests. Moreover, in a context of higher F1 and F2, listeners found it more difficult to discriminate stimuli belonging to the /u/ category (which has lower F1 and F2), which may result from the effect of the referential formants of the context. Despite the influence of contextual factors, both /ɤ/ and /u/ in Mandarin showed relatively stable perception categories, and the perceived psychological parameters were consistent with the measured acoustic values Wu Zongji (1964) found for the Mandarin vowels /ɤ/ and /u/.