Categorical perception of post-alveolar sibilants by Taiwan and Beijing Mandarin speakers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates how dialect-specific phonetic variation affects speech perception. Previous studies have pointed out that the contrast between dental and retroflex sibilants tends to be lost in connected speech in Taiwan Mandarin, while the contrast is maintained in Beijing Mandarin (Chang 2013, Noguchi et al. 2015). A study has demonstrated that, due to the merger, Taiwan speakers have a broader/weaker category for the retroflex sibilant relative to the dental sibilant (Chang 2013). In this study, we test whether the weakness of the category affects the perception of retroflex sibilants relative to the other class of sibilant in the inventory of Mandarin phonemes. Specifically, we compared Taiwan and Beijing Mandarin speakers on their perception of retroflex [?] and alveolopalatal [?]. The experiment consisted of two tasks: identification and an ABX discrimination tasks in which participants compared a sound to two sounds that were separated by 2 steps. Stimuli were drawn from a 10-step continuum from retroflex [?a] to alveolopalatal [?a]. Overall results showed that the two groups of speakers did not differ in their perception of the sibilants. In the identification task, both groups evinced the same category boundary location (step 6). In the ABX discrimination task, both groups showed the highest sensitivity to the difference between stimuli that straddled the category boundary (i.e., step 5 vs. step 7). Taken together, the data indicate that both groups perceived the continuum in a categorical manner, and that the boundary between the categories was the same for the 2 groups. Beijing speakers, however, showed slightly better sensitivity to difference between stimuli drawn from the alveolopalatal end (e.g. step 6 vs. step 8).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".