Relative contributions of vowels and consonants in recognizing isolated Mandarin words

This study investigated the relative contributions of vowels and consonants in recognizing isolated Mandarin words. Normal-hearing native-Mandarin listeners were instructed to recognize isolated Mandarin words and identify consonants, vowels and tones with stimuli synthesized to contain different proportions of consonant or vowel segments, including five conditions of consonant-only, vowel-only, consonant or vowel plus consonant-vowel (C-V) transition, and C-V transition. The recognition score of the vowel-only Mandarin words was significantly higher than that of the consonant-only words; and word recognition scores had a higher correlation with vowel identification scores than consonant identification scores. Moreover, adding a small portion of C-V transition significantly improved the recognition score of the consonant-only Mandarin words. In the conditions of C-V transition and consonant plus C-V transition, the duration of preserved portion predicted modestly well the scores of isolated word recognition, and vowel, consonant and lexical tone identification in Mandarin. These findings suggest that there is a greater contribution of vowels than consonants to isolated word recognition in Mandarin, which is different from previous outcomes in English.