| Sumario: | Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the aging effects on the categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical Tones 1–4 and Tones 1–2 in noise. It also investigated whether listeners’ categorical tone perception in noise correlated with their general tone identification of 20 natural vowel-plus-tone signals in noise. Method: Twelve younger and 12 older listeners with normal hearing were recruited in both tone identification and discrimination tasks in a CP paradigm where fundamental frequency contours of target stimuli varied systematically from the flat tone (Tone 1) to the rising/falling tones (Tones 2/4). Both tasks were conducted in quiet and noise with signal-to-noise ratios set at −5 and−10 dB, respectively, and general tone identification of natural speech signals was also tested in noise conditions. Results: Compared with younger listeners, older listeners had shallower identification slopes and smaller discrimination peakedness in Tones 1–2/4 perception in all listening conditions, except for Tones 1–4 perception in quiet where no group differences were found. Meanwhile, noise affected Tones 1–2/4 perception: The signal-to-noise ratio condition at −10 dB brought shallower slope in Tones 1–2/4 identification and less peakedness in Tones 1–4 discrimination for both listener groups. Older listeners’ CP innoise, the identification slopes in particular, positively correlatedwith their generaltoneidentificationinnoise, but suchcorrelationswerepartiallymissingforyoungerlisteners. Conclusions: Both aging and the presence of speechshaped noise significantly reduced the CP of Mandarin Tones 1–2/4. Listeners’ Mandarin tone recognition may be related to their CP of Mandarin tones.
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