Cue weighting differences in perception of Spanish sentence types between native listeners of Chinese and Spanish

This study examined the acoustic cue weighting in Spanish question-statement identification between native listeners of a tonal (Chinese) and a non-tonal language (Spanish). Listeners’ performance was evaluated using two identification tests, whereby the stimuli were generated by manipulating the F0 contour, duration, and amplitude of the word-final syllable. A logistic sigmoid model was used to fit the question-statement identification function, and the model parameters were further estimated using a linear mixed-effect analysis. Results showed that Spanish listeners were more sensitive to the F0 linear transitions perceived as intonation, suggesting that the tonal language benefit in pitch perception may be limited to specific dimensions of pitch events. Nevertheless, Spanish listeners needed a higher terminal pitch to identify questions than Chinese speakers, especially when the duration or amplitude was decreased. Besides, our study revealed that native Spanish speakers gave more weight to the secondary cues of duration and amplitude and made greater compensations for the acoustic perturbations than Chinese listeners. These cross-linguistic differences of cue weighting between the two groups can be attributed to several factors, including listeners’ previous linguistic experience with the first and the target language and the perceptual compensatory capacity in speech.