[This is a presentation of Yuan and Shihong’s upcoming ASA meeting poster; you can find the poster here.]

Xiapu Min is a variety of Min Chinese spoken in Xiapu, Fujian, China. The language has seven tones, two of which (T5 & T2) are checked tones that only appear in syllables with a glottal stop coda (Chai & Ye, 2019). Compared with their unchecked counterparts, checked tones have distinct f0 contours, glottalization at the end of the syllable, and are of shorter duration. In this study, we investigate whether those acoustic features are used by listeners of Xiapu Min to identify whether a tone is checked or not. We ran a forced-choice identification task with resynthesized audio stimuli. Stimuli consisted of a natural unchecked token resynthesized with five distinct f0 contours. Each vowel was further modified to have a short vs. long duration and presence vs. absence of glottalization. The results indicate that the listeners are more likely to identify a stimulus as having a checked tone when it has a high/low-falling f0 contour, shorter duration, or glottalization, among which the f0 and duration have larger coefficients than glottalization. Thus, all three phonetic parameters found in checked tone production also influence checked tone identification. However, f0 and duration are more likely to be the main cues whereas glottalization is the periphery cue for checked tone identification.