Categorical Perception in intonation

According to Pierrehumbert (1980), two level tones - H and L - are enough in representing intonation of intonational languages. But in Korean, high fall and low fall boundary tones, both of which must be represented as HL％ in intonational phonology as in Jun (1993, 1999), are distinct not only acoustically but also functionally. The same is true in the case of high level and mid level boundary tones, which must be represented as H％ in intonational phonology. In this paper, I conducted two identification tests to provide crucial evidence that H and L are not enough in intonational phonology. The results of the identification tests show that categorical perception occur between high level and low level as well as between high fall and low fall. Based on this fact and the results of the acoustic analyses in Lee (1999, 2000), I strongly propose to adopt one more level tone - M - to represent Korean boundary tones.