Neutral Tone Realization in Tianjin Mandarin

This study examines the acoustic realization of neutral tone in Tianjin Mandarin, which shows great variability in the f0 patterns. Previous studies, mainly with impressionistic data, have proposed that the neutral tone in Tianjin Mandarin has different underlying tonal targets depending on the tonal contexts, in particular the following tone. This presents a great challenge to the crossdialectal understanding of neutral tone realization in the Mandarin family. With well-controlled laboratory speech, we show that the f0 contours over the neutral tone syllable can be predicted from the neighboring lexical tones and much of the f0 variation can be explained by factors that are known to affect lexical tone realization, namely, tone sandhi, focus, and tonal coarticulation.