Relationship Between Perceptual Accuracy and Productive Distinctness of Question and Statement Intonations in Mandarin

Studies on the perception-production relationship have reported mixed findings regarding whether better perception of phonetic contrasts is correlated with greater productive distinctness between categories. This study investigates the correlation between perceptual accuracy and productive distinctness of question and statement intonations in Mandarin Chinese. Following a previous production study with sixteen talkers (8F, 8M), we invited the eight female talkers back to complete an intonation identification task with stimuli from the production study. Identification accuracy was analyzed with Bayesian mixed-effects models, which revealed a close perception-production link. Specifically, Mandarin listeners showed a clear self-advantage, identifying their own intonations more accurately than those of others. When listening to other talkers’ speech, listeners who made more distinction in their own speech were more accurate, and listeners were overall better at hearing the distinction when the talker produced greater prosodic distinctness between question and statement intonations. Moreover, the effect of productive distinctness in the stimuli was stronger for questions than for statements and for intonations ending in T4 than in T2, highlighting the complex and context-dependent nature of perception-production link in Mandarin intonations.