The Timing of Acoustic vs. Perceptual Availability of Segmental and Suprasegmental Information

This study investigates the timing of perception of tonal and segmental information. Its purpose is to determine whether the apparent delay that previous priming studies have reported for the processing of tonal information (relative to the processing of segmental information) may stem from lowlevel speech perception. Native Chinese listeners and native English listeners without knowledge of tone languages completed a gated AX-discrimination task where they heard increasingly large fragments of Chinese word pairs that differed only in tones or only in segments. The gates where listeners perceived the contrasts were compared after factoring out differences in when the contrasts became reliably present acoustically. The results of both groups show that the perception of tonal information is delayed compared to that of segmental information, with English speakers showing a larger delay than Chinese speakers.