This study examines the effect of preceding tones on tone perception within Mandarin disyllabic utterances and the underlying mechanism that causes such an effect. Listeners were presented with a series of tone targets varying perceptually from Mandarin Tone 3 to Tone 4 following Tone 1, Tone 2, or Tone 4. The results showed that the targets were more likely to be categorized as Tone 3 following the context tones with high offset f0 (Tone 1 and Tone 2) than following those with low offset f0 (Tone 4). The effect of preceding tones compensated for the acoustic consequence of coarticulation because the context tone with high offset f0 produced Tone 4-like Tone 3 variant in production, but tended to elicit Tone 3 identification of this variant in perception. Moreover, we also observed an effect of nonspeech contexts that preserved only the f0 contours of speech contexts. However, the effect of nonspeech contexts was significantly smaller than that of speech contexts, and the difference was not caused by focal attention. Our findings lend evidence to a general auditory mechanism and point to future work clarifying the factors that modulate the magnitude of perceptual context effect.

本研究探讨了前声调对普通话双音节话语中声调感知的影响以及导致这种影响的潜在机制。听者在感知上呈现一系列从普通话声调 3 到声调 1、声调 2 或声调 4 的声调目标。结果表明，目标更有可能在高音的上下文声调之后被归类为声调 3。偏移 f0（音调 1 和音调 2）比跟随低偏移 f0（音调 4）的那些。先前音调的效果补偿了协同发音的声学后果，因为具有高偏移 f0 的上下文音调在生产中产生了类似于音调 4 的音调 3 变体，但往往会在感知中引起对这种变体的音调 3 的识别。而且，我们还观察到仅保留语音上下文的 f0 轮廓的非语音上下文的影响。然而，非语音上下文的影响明显小于语音上下文，并且差异不是由焦点注意力引起的。我们的研究结果为一般听觉机制提供了证据，并指出了未来的工作，以澄清调节感知环境效应大小的因素。