A Production and Perception Study on Tonal Neutralization in Nanchang Chinese

A Production and Perception Study on Tonal Neutralization in Nanchang

In a production study of tonal contrasts in lexically stressed but grammatically stressless syllables vs. lexically stressless syllables in Nanchang, a Gan dialect spoken in the city of Nanchang, Jiangxi province, we found that tonal neutralization only occurs in lexically stressless syllables. We argue that the main phonetic ground for such a tonal contrast distribution lies in the rhyme durat...

Durational Properties of Lexical Stress and Grammatical Stress in Nanchang Chinese and Their Implications for Tonal Contrasts

Gradience in contextual tonal realization processes: An instrumental study of Nanjing Chinese

This acoustic study has investigated contextual tonal variations in 125 disyllabic words produced by six native speakers of Nanjing Chinese, with five phonemic tones. Three types of tonal variation were observed in the data: neutralizing sandhi, nonneutralizing sandhi and tonal coarticulation. Comparison between the three types of tonal variation suggests that tone sandhi may be rooted in phone...

Statistical Modeling of Mandarin Tone Sandhi: Neutralization of Underlying Pitch Targets

This study statistically models the surface f0 contour and the underlying pitch target of a well-studied third sandhi tone of Mandarin Chinese. Although the growth curve analysis on the surface f0 contours indicates non-neutralization of this sandhi tone (T3) and the base T2, their underlying pitch targets do show neutralization. These results in Mandarin are also consistent with the perception...

Production and Perception of a Tonal Neutralization Case in Taiwan Southern Min

This study explored the tonal neutralization of context tones 55 and 24 in Taiwan Southern Min, which are said to be realized both as sandhi tone 33 on surface when occurring in the context positions according to the Tone Circle. A production experiment with a reading task was conducted and the speech samples produced by speakers of two different age groups, old and young generations, were exam...