内部因素与元音范畴化感知

The present study aims to compare the influence of inherent vowel formants with steady-state property (monophthong) and dynamic property (diphthong) on the CP of Mandarin vowels. Utilizing a classic paradigm of CP, three types of stimuli along the vowel continuum were synthesized, including monphthong-to-monophthong and diphthong-to-monophthong continuum. The perceptual results indicated that the degree of CP was much higher for the diphthong-to-monophthong continuum (/ai/-/a/and/ia/-/a/) compared with the monophthong-to-monophthong continuum /i/-/a/. We suggest that it was the relative direction changes of internal formants that promoted the degree of CP of vowels. Furthermore, we put forward some quantitative indexes to objectively evaluate the degree of CP in both behavioral and electrophysiological studies.