Creaky voice identification in Mandarin: The effects of prosodic position, tone, pitch range and creak locality

Abstract

Creaky voice, a non-modal aperiodic phonation that is often associated with low pitch targets, has been found to not only correlate linguistically with prosodic boundary, tonal categories, and pitch range, but also socially with age, gender, and social status. However, it is still not clear whether co-varying factors such as prosodic boundary, pitch range, and tone could, in turn, affect listeners' identification of creak. To fill this gap, this current study examines how creaky voice is identified in Mandarin through experimental data, aiming to enhance our understanding of cross-linguistic perception of creaky voice and, more broadly, speech perception in multi-variable contexts. Our results reveal that in Mandarin, creak identification is context-dependent: factors including prosodic position, tone, pitch range, and the amount of creak all affect how Mandarin listeners identify creak. This reflects listeners' knowledge about the distribution of creak in linguistically universal (e.g., prosodic boundary) and language-specific (e.g., lexical tone) environments.