Context-dependent coupling and dissociation between speech production and perception in Mandarin tones

AbstractThe mechanisms linking speech production and perception remain underspecified, particularly in how segmental and suprasegmental features are processed across different contextual variations. This study investigated whether perceptual cue weighting could be predicted by distributional reliability of acoustic cues in production, focusing on the Mandarin Tone 2–Tone 3 contrast across both gradient coarticulatory (T1, T2, T4) and categorical T3 sandhi contexts. We quantified production distributional reliability using the Bhattacharyya coefficient and assessed perceptual cue weighting through relative weight analysis. Bayesian mixed-effects modeling showed strong evidence for context-dependent acoustic distributions in production and cue weighting in perception. Critically, production–perception coupling emerged selectively. In gradient contexts, higher production reliability strongly predicted perceptual weighting, with robust correlations for critical cues in the T2 and T4 contexts, though this pattern was less evident in the T1 context. No such coupling was observed for secondary cues across contexts. In contrast, in the categorical T3 sandhi context, production statistics did not predict perceptual weights. These findings reveal a context-sensitive production–perception relationship: tightly coupled in gradient coarticulatory contexts, but dissociated in categorical rule-governed environments. This pattern suggests that tone processing involves a dynamic interplay between bottom-up sensitivity to statistical regularities and top-down phonological constraints, rather than relying on a uniform statistical mapping mechanism.