The impact of multifaceted factors on auditory mapping between acoustic cues and Spanish intonation categories in a cross-linguistic context

Recent research has revealed cross-linguistic and individual variations in the processing of acoustic cues for phonetic categorization. This study extends this line of inquiry by examining the auditory perception of native Spanish listeners and Chinese learners of Spanish, focusing on their ability to map acoustic signals onto intonation categories. Through two identification tasks employing synthesized stimuli with systematically varied acoustic and stress patterns, we investigated how listeners navigate multiple cues in recognizing Spanish sentence types. Results indicated that changes in fundamental frequency (F0), duration, and intensity significantly influenced native Spanish listeners’ intonation judgments, while Chinese learners predominantly relied on F0 modulations to differentiate statements from yes/no questions. Compared to native Spanish listeners, Chinese learners demonstrated lower sensitivity to changes across the three cues and less proficiency in reconciling cue trade-offs. Furthermore, our study revealed that both Spanish and Chinese listeners’ perceptual performance was modulated by stress patterns and their chronological age. Overall, our research elucidates the multifaceted nature of intonation perception, underscoring the critical role of linguistic background, individual characteristics, and lower-level prosodic context in the transformation of acoustic details into intonation categories.