3 tone sandhi in Standard Chinese: A corpus approach

In Standard Chinese, a low tone (Tone3) is often realized with a rising F0 contour before another low tone; this tone change is known as the 3 tone sandhi. This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of the 3 tone sandhi in Standard Chinese in telephone conversations and broadcast news speech. The sandhi rising tone was found to be different from the lexical rising tone (Tone2) in disyllabic words in two measures: the magnitude of the F0 rise and the time span of the F0 rise. We also found that word frequency affected the realization of the sandhi rising tone. Specifically, the sandhi rising tone in highly frequent words exhibited a smaller F0 rise (i.e., a greater difference from the lexical rising tone) than that observed in less frequent words. This result suggests that different processes may be involved in producing highvs. low-frequency words in Chinese.