Successive Addition Boundary Tone in Chinese Disgust Intonation

Based on two Mandarin speakers’ data, we found a kind of successive addition boundary tone in disgust intonation when the tones of the final boundary syllables are tone 1, tone 2 or tone 3. In this case, the disgust boundary tone is composed by two components, i.e., the lexical tone which is employed to express lexical meaning, and the expressive tone which is realized as a falling tone to express disgust emotion. Further, the acoustic features of the boundary tones in disgust emotion were analyzed, and the study proposed that tone1 has a longer successive addition tone which almost equals to the length of its lexical tone. In regard with tone 2 and tone 3, the successive tones are relatively shorter which account for 36% and 58% of the proceeding lexical tones. The mean slopes of the additive falling tones range from -53st/s to -33st/s.