Effects of speaking rate and context on the production of Mandarin tone

Acoustic variability is ubiquitous in speech. To understand how listeners cope with this variability, the present study focuses on Mandarin tones. Since the major cues to tone are both spectral (F0 height and direction) and temporal (turning point, TP), tones provide a good test case to evaluate effects of context. The present study examined production variation due to changes in speaking rate and tonal context. Twelve speakers (6M, 6F) produced target syllables with the four different Mandarin tones at fast, normal and slow speaking rates. These syllables appeared at the end of a carrier sentence, following either a high-level tone (Tone 1) or a high-falling tone (Tone 4). Speaking rate had a similar effect across all tones and consonants while preceding context resulted in changes to temporal parameters such as turning point.