Search

This study experimented with mobile devices to investigate the effects of tones and time pressure on the voice input experience for Mandarin Chinese. Voice input for Mandarin Chinese is gaining popularity, and its implementation on mobile devices has recently developed very rapidly. Previous studies have focused mainly on technical considerations for designing a voice input system and have not investigated the user experience of voice input. Two experiments were conducted to test single-character and two-character phrases. Four measurements, the number of errors, user satisfaction, mental workload, and skin conductance, were gathered from sixty-four participants for each experiment. The results indicated that Mandarin tones had a significant influence on the number of errors and user satisfaction, and time pressure significantly influenced all measurements. Specifically, the falling-rising tone produced the highest number of errors, and the rising tone led to the lowest satisfaction. A high level of time pressure resulted in low satisfaction, a high mental workload, and high skin conductance. The results indicated that (a) Mandarin tones significantly affected error rates and user satisfaction, and (b) time pressure had a significant effect on user experience. The findings have design implications for voice input systems in terms of user experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The degree to which cognitive resources are shared in the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones remains uncertain. Testing Mandarin amusics on their categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones may provide insight into this issue. In the present study, a group of 15 amusic Mandarin speakers identified and discriminated Mandarin tones presented as continua in separate blocks. The tonal continua employed were from a high-level tone to a mid-rising tone and from a high-level tone to a high-falling tone. The two tonal continua were made in the contexts of natural speech and of nonlinguistic analogues. In contrast to the controls, the participants with amusia showed no improvement for discrimination pairs that crossed the classification boundary for either speech or nonlinguistic analogues, indicating a lack of categorical perception. The lack of categorical perception of Mandarin tones in the amusic group shows that the pitch deficits in amusics may be domain-general, and this suggests that the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones may share certain cognitive resources and/or processes (Patel , , ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]