Syllable Contraction in Taiwan Mandarin

Taiwan Mandarin syllable contraction is a lenition process which involves the elision of the intervocalic segments and the merger of the tonal elements of two syllables. Trough depth is employed as the measure for gradience of syllable contraction in this study and the distribution of trough depth shows that syllable contraction is optional. In the perception experiment, listeners were asked to do a forced-choice identification task and the accuracy was generally high. The production results verify that syllable contraction is optional and gradient, and the duration and F0 range are the acoustic cues that contribute to the distinction between the fully-contracted tokens and the lexical tokens.