Investigation reveals that talker frequency affects word recognition in tone language listeners, suggesting a complex interaction with lexical status.
How the dual function of fundamental frequency (F0)—talker separation and word distinction—affects Mandarin word recognition in a cocktail party scenario is investigated. A robust benefit of talker F0 separation is observed: Target recognition was more accurate with different-sex talkers (85%) than same-sex talkers (48%). The effect of word-F0 was modulated by lexical status: Real-word tonal minimal pairs lowered accuracy relative to the baseline (average 4% decrease), whereas nonword tonal minimal pairs did not compromise performance. Thus, tone language listeners leverage talker-F0 differences just as non-tone language listeners do, but the advantage is constrained by the lexical role of F0.
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Wang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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