Confusability of Chinese Intonation

Do lexical tones interfere with the realization of intonation types? Given that tone and intonation both use F0 as a primary cue, can a listener reliably identify statements and questions when some of the channel capacity is taken up by lexical tones? We study this issue through a perception test on a carefully designed and obtained intonation corpus on Mandarin Chinese. Our study shows the following: 1. Statement intonation is easier to recognize than question intonation; 2. the sentence-final tone does not affect statement intonation recognition; 3. question intonation is easier to recognize if the sentence-final tone is falling whereas it is harder to recognize if the sentence-final tone is rising. Implications of the results for the modeling of Chinese intonation are discussed.