A Study On Tone Perception Of Honggu Dialect In Gansu Province

Honggu District is located in the central part of Gansu Province.Its dialect belongs to Jincheng Section of Lanyin Mandarin.Compared with other dialects,the tones of Honggu dialect is very special.So far,many linguists have studied it,and they found there are only two tones.Although many linguists have studied it,no one has ever studied it by psychological experiment.Based on the experimental methods of phonetics and psychology,this paper studies the number and the value of tones in Honggu dialect by means of quantitative analysis.Then synthesis the tone continuity of Honggu dialect and Mandarin by PSOLA.Finally design perception experiments with E-prime and let the native speakers of Honggu dialect to carry out experiments and judging their perception patterns.This article is divided into three parts.The first part is the experimental study of monosyllabic tones in Honggu dialect.In this part,as long as the fundamental frequency is analyzed.Extraction of fundamental frequency data and normalization them with MATLAB and conversion them to 5-degree value.Determining the tone and evolution of Honggu dialect.The second part is to study how the native speakers to percept the tones in their dialect.By identifying and distinguishing two experiments,analysis data,including the location,width and sharpness of the category boundary,the predicted distinguishing curve and the actual distinguishing curve,judging the perception pattern of the native speakers to the dialect.The third part is to study how the native speakers to percept the tones in Mandarin.The method and process is same to the second part.Finally,we get the following conclusion:First,there are only two tones in Honggu dialect,they are Pingqu(13)and Shang(55).The Ping,voiced of Shang,Qu and Ru are merged into Pingqu.The voiceless,aspirational voiceless and the secondary voiced of Shang are merged into Shang.Second,the pattern of the native speakers to percept the tones of Honggu dialect is categorical perception.There are peaks in the distinguishing curves,and the identifying boundary is wide and less steep.The discrimination rate are more than 60%,but the magnitude of the curve is small,so the author think its category is weak.Third,the pattern of native speakers to percept the T1-T2,T1-T3,T1-T4,T2-T4,T3-T4 are categorical perception,but the T2-T3 is continuous perception.The T3-T4 has the highest degree of categorization.After analysis,we think maybe the native speakers are influenced by their dialect so they can not distinguish the Yangping and Shang very well.