Effects of syllable positions on Taiwanese Mandarin sibilant perception

Both frication noise and formant transitions have been argued to be important cues in sibilant perception. Additionally, the availability of coarticulatory cues to adjacent segments in vowel transitions has been argued to be asymmetric; more coarticulatory information is available in vowel onsets. Less research has examined how the use of cues may vary across syllable positions. This paper investigates cue-weighting in sibilant perception by Taiwanese Mandarin listeners. Specifically, we examine whether listeners' attention is drawn to different cues when the sibilant occurs in a phonotactically illegal position. The results demonstrate that listeners are more sensitive to sibilants distinctions in phonotactically illegal contexts (VC sequences).We conclude with the observation that while the reliance on frication noise seems to be greater in phonotactically illegal contexts, in phonotactically legal contexts, place of articulation cues from the frication noise and vowel transitions are more integrated.