Perception of Stress in Disyllabic Words in Changsha Xiang: The Effects of Syllable Duration and F0 Contour

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Abstract

Lexical stress has been approached from the perspective of neutral/neutralised tones in Chinese. Changsha tones are shortened and flattened in metrically weak positions. To investigate the exploitation of acoustic cues (syllable duration and F0 contour) in perceiving Changsha stress, an AX discrimination task was conducted. Three acoustic conditions were contrived by obscuring the duration or F0 of pseudoword or real word pairs contrasting in stress. Thirty native Changsha speakers were tasked with identifying whether pairs of disyllables had identical or different stress patterns. Three-way repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted on accuracy rate, reaction time, and sensitivity d’. The results showed that while both cues provided facilitation to the discerning of stress patterns, the effect of F0 contour weighs more than that of syllable duration. Additionally, the pitch cue was more helpful in processing tones that exhibited larger acoustic differences between alternants and in processing real words. The results also challenged the Functional Load Hypothesis of stress marking, and called for further acoustic, perceptual, typological and second language research.

Figure 4. Sensitivity d’ by Acoustic Condition and σ2 Tone

Citation

Zhou, W. (2025, May 16). Perception of stress in disyllabic words in Changsha Xiang: The effects of syllable duration and F0 contour [Poster presentation]. The Third International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI2025), May 16–18, Herrsching, Germany.