Perceptual Correlates of Pitch Intervals with Standard Chinese Disyllabic Tone Strings

In songs of tonal languages, lyric discernment entails some kind of tone-tune correspondence. Such correspondence has been found to lie in a non-contradictory pitch transition between the tone and melody of two adjacent syllables (Ho 2006; Wee 2007; Kirby & Ladd 2016). This study contributes that pitch intervals also affect the identification of tones, and hence deserve consideration.
In my study, melodies of three pitch transitions (i.e. level, upward, and downward) composed of two single musical notes were presented as stimuli for identification. Five level melodies were set in different absolute pitches; the lowest was A3 and highest was C5 on the piano. The other eighteen melodies involved pitch intervals ranging from minor second to octave. Eight native Standard Chinese speakers, 5 females and 3 males, participated in the experiment. For each stimulant melody,
subjects were asked to supply acceptable disyllabic tone combination(s), which come(s) from pairwise combinations of the four Standard Chinese tones: T1 /55/, T2 /25/, T3 /214/, and T4 /51/.
Results show that in the given cases where each syllable has a non-contoured melody, most tones are identified as the two level tones in Standard Chinese, T1 (i.e. /55/) and T3 (i.e. as [21], one of the variants of /214/). Unlike T1, T3 is more perceptible only at lower absolute pitches. However, as the pitch interval becomes larger, the likelihood of perceiving the lower musical note as T3 increases. Meanwhile, the perception of combinations of T3 and the other two tones (i.e. T2 and T4) are only perceived when the pitch intervals are greater than the perfect fourth. In these cases, up- or downward pitch transition regardless, the lower note is perceived as T3 and the higher as T2 or T4.
These results suggest that (i) T1 is the default tone in Standard Chinese tone perception; (ii) the surface tone of T3 plays a role in perception; and (iii) pitch intervals help distinguish T3 from the other tones. These suggestions provide a further understanding of pitch perceptual relationships among the four Standard Chinese tones, especially in the distinction between T3 and T4 in singing— a point uncaptured in Yu’s (1963) and Wee’s (2007) studies. On this basis, taking pitch interval into consideration enriches the explanations to tone-tune correspondence in Standard Chinese songs.