Psychology

"This study investigates how context affects the perception of suprasegments, more specifically, lexical tone. Many studies have looked at context effects on the perception of segments; however, significantly fewer studies have examined context effects on suprasegments. Overlap among phonetic categories occurs at the level segments, and studies on the perception of segments have shown that listeners are able to perceive quite different acoustic structures as the same segments depending on the speaker. This process of perceptually compensating for differences among speakers is called speaker normalization. Given that overlap among phonetic categories occurs also at the level of suprasegments, it is quite plausible that normalization is required for the perception of suprasegments. ... The experiment in this study first looks at whether the problem of speaker variability affects tone perception, then it looks at how different semantically-neutral contexts affect tone perception"--Introduction.