Spindex and Spearcons in Mandarin: Auditory Menu Enhancements Successful in A Tonal Language

Auditory displays have been used extensively to enhance visual menus across diverse settings for various reasons. While standard auditory displays can be effective and help users across these settings, standard auditory displays often consist of text to speech cues, which can be time intensive to use. Advanced auditory cues including spindex and spearcon cues have been developed to help address this slow feedback issue. While these cues are most often used in English, they have also been applied to other languages, but research on using them in tonal languages, which may affect the ability to use them, is lacking. The current research investigated the use of spindex and spearcon cues in Mandarin, to determine their effectiveness in a tonal language. The results suggest that the cues can be effectively applied and used in a tonal language by untrained novices. This opens the door to future use of the cues in languages that reach a large portion of the world’s population.