Contracted Syllables in Mandarin: Evidence from Spontaneous Conversations

Fast speech contains pronunciation reductions to different extents. This paper examines perceptually identified syllable contractions with a corpus of spontaneous Mandarin data. By means of quantitative analyses and acoustical measurements, we find that syllable contraction is a continuous process with a predictable target syllable. Our statistic analyses show that contraction forms of a given combination of syllables are more than one, but they are similar in the way that the extremely shortened form is targeting the same syllable. We also find that morphological distribution influences syllable positions in a contraction. Suffixes are more frequently contracted with a preceding syllable than a following syllable. Syllables with a zero initial are more likely to be contracted with their previous syllable and syllables with a voiceless aspirated initial consonant are the least likely syllables to be found contracted with their preceding syllables. Acoustic analyses show that consonantal effects on vowels are rarely found in the data, whereas the process of nuclei merging tends to be more essential. The back-front contrast seems to be a factor influencing the way vowels of different syllables are merged together. Using natural discourse data, we are able to validate claims made on the issue of syllable contraction and we also point to several new directions of study related to segmental changes in the process of contraction.