A socio-phonetic analysis of Taiwan Mandarin interview speech

This paper presents results of a socio-phonetic analysis of Taiwan Mandarin by using a corpus of questionnaire-based interview speech. Questions were asked to collect data of the interviewee’s background of language use, socio-economic status, and internet access in different regions of Taiwan. Two typical dialect-influenced pronunciation errors, the deletion of /w/ before /o/ and the delabilialization of /y/ were analyzed with the associated socio-economic factors and the degree of dialect exposure. The degree of dialect exposure (Southern Min) and the studied pronunciation variants are statistically correlated with the accuracy rate. But no direct correlation was found between the pronunciation variation and the socioeconomic factors.