Perception & Psychophysics 1993, 53 (2), 157-165 Processing interactions between segmental and suprasegmental information in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese LISA LEE and HOWARD C. NUSBAUM University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois The processing interactions between segmental and suprasegmental information in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese were investigated in a speeded classification task. Since in Chinese, unlike in English, tones convey lexically meaningful information, native speakers of these languages may process combinations of segmental and-suprasegmental: information differ- ently. Subjects heard consonant-vowel syllables varying on a consonantal (segmental) dimension and either a Mandarin Chinese or constant-pitch (non-Mandarin) suprasegmental dimensionThe English listeners showed mutual integrality with the Mandarin Chinese stimuli, but not the constant-pitch stimuli. The native Chinese listeners processed these dimensions with mutual integrality for both the Mandarin Chinese and the constant-pitch stimuli. These results were interpreted in terms of the linguistic function and the structure of suprasegmental information in Chinese and English. The results suggest that the way listeners perceive speech depends on the interaction between the structure of the signal and the processing strategies of the listener. In recognizing spoken words, listeners interpret infor- mation from the patterns of speech using a variety of sources of linguistic knowledge. Knowledge of the seman- tic, syntactic, and phonological structure of language, for example, provides much constraint for word recognition (e.g., Newell, 1975). However, even when considering the pattern structure of speech alone, different kinds of information contribute to recognition. Listeners recognize speech using both segmental information, which concerns the consonants and vowels in speech, and suprasegmen- tal information, which concerns acoustic properties that extend over more than one segment, such as intonation contours or stress patterns. In all languages, segmental distinctions are used to convey differences between words; however, in some languages, suprasegmental information serves this function as well. In tone languages such as Mandarin Chinese, two different words may have exactly the same pattern of consonants and vowels and differ only in their pattern of intonation. Every word in Mandarin Chinese has one of four tones; placing a different tonal contour on the same segmental sequence can change word meaning. For example, the word da may mean dozen, hit, or big, depending on the tone applied to it. In contrast to Chinese, in languages like English, suprasegmentals have a much more limited role in dis- tinguishing words. For example, stress differences sig- This research was supported in part by National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders, DC 00601. We thank Xiao- lei Wang for her advice and assistance with the Mandarin Chinese ma- terials. We also thank Jenny DeGroot and Anne Henly for helpful com- ments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Address correspondence and reprint requests to H. C. Nusbaum, Department of Psychology, Uni- versity of Chicago, 5848 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637. nal the noun-verb distinction in words such as rebel, in which primary stress falls on the first syllable for a noun and on the second syllable for a verb (see Chomsky & Halle, 1968). However, beyond this relatively limited lex- ical function, intonation contours in English generally con- vey syntactic, pragmatic, and affective information (see Bolinger, 1989). The way native Chinese and English listeners represent words may reflect the different lexi- cal function of suprasegmentals. For example, native Chinese listeners may incorporate both segmental and suprasegmental information in their lexical representa- tions, whereas native English listeners may represent primarily segmental information. As a consequence of the differences in lexical relevance of segmental and supraseg- mental information to native Chinese and English listeners, they may show different patterns of perceptual interactions between these two types of information. That is, native English listeners may process segmental and suprasegmental dimensions as different kinds of informa- tion on the basis of their different phonemic status, whereas native Chinese listeners may process these di- mensions similarly on the basis of their shared phonemic status. Furthermore, since in Mandarin Chinese both suprasegmental and segmental information play a pho- nemic role in recognizing words, perhaps these dimen- sions are processed by native listeners of Chinese in the same way that segmental (i.e., phonemic) dimensions are processed by English listeners. An experimental paradigm that reveals the nature of the interactions between different sources of information is Garner’s (1970, 1974) speeded classification task. In this paradigm, subjects hear stimuli that can vary along two dimensions and classify them according to their values 157 Copyright 1993 Psychonomic Society, Inc.