Representation of Mandarin intonations: boundary tone revisited

In order to find where exactly the Mandarin interrogative cues are located and whether Mandarin question intonation could be represented using a boundary high tone (H%), we conducted a perceptional experiment, asking 10 native listeners to identify manipulated Mandarin utterances with question or statement intonations. Listeners judged four types of stimuli, which are full utterance, utterance without the last syllable, utterance without the last prosodic word, utterance remaining the first prosodic word. The results show that the correct question identification percentage drops significantly when the last prosodic word is missing, but the majority of listeners are still able to identify the questions correctly, even when the stimulus only contains the first prosodic word. This result supports the claim that Mandarin interrogative cues distribute over an entire utterance. High pitch in both edges of the intonation phrase should be marked out.