Phonological ganging is a type of cumulativity in constraint interaction where one strong constraint C1 can be overtaken by two weaker constraints C2 and C3 together but not by C2 or C3 independently (e.g., Jäger and Rosenbach 2006). In strict-ranking Optimality Theory (OT), phonological ganging is achieved via (local) constraint conjunction (e.g., Smolensky 1993, 2006; Baković 2000; Ito and Me...

Given that Mandarin is a tone language and English is not, the present study investigated the perception of Mandarin tones in young school-aged children with or without tone language exposure. Mandarin Monolingual (MM), English-Mandarin Bilingual (EMB) and English Monolingual (EM) children aged 6 to 8 years participated in tone identification and discrimination tasks. Tone identification and di...

The neutral tone in Taiwan Mandarin (TM) behaves differently from that of Standard Mandarin. Many neutral-tone syllables in TM are not reduced and have a low pitch target regardless of the preceding tone. These neutral-tone syllables are therefore acoustically similar to Tone 3 syllables in TM. This paper investigates how TM listeners distinguish Tone 3 (low tone) from the neutral tone. The res...

Consonants in /CV/ syllables usually have potential influence on onset fundamental frequency (i.e., onset f0) of succeeding vowels. Previous studies showed such effect with respect to the aspiration of stops with evidence from Mandarin, a tonal language. While few studies investigated the effect on onset f0 from the aspiration of affricates. The differences between stops and affricates in aspir...

Among the four Mandarin lexical tones, Tone 2 and Tone 3 have been found to be the most confusable perceptually for both native speakers and non-native speakers. This study investigates whether the overall tone duration serves as a perceptual cue and whether L1 and L2 listeners weigh the cue in the same manner in distinguishing the two tones. In doing so, two perceptual experiments using durati...

Mandarin has four lexical tones and Hong Kong Cantonese has six lexical tones. The pitch pattern of T1 and T4 in Mandarin is high level and high falling. According to the results of previous research, the pitch boundary of T1 and T4 by native speakers of Mandarin is categorical. Using the synthesized disyllable real words as stimuli, this paper aims to examine the identification and discriminat...

In many languages, tone (i.e., pitch patterns) is part of the phonological system; two words with the same sequences of segments can differ only in tone. Tone does not distinguish word meanings in English, so English-learning infants can ignore tone when learning words, but do they? We examined the encoding of tonal detail in word learning by monolingual English-learning 14and 17-month-olds. In...

Based on the acoustic experimental data from 30 subjects, we reported sociophonetic variation in the citation tones in Chongqing Mandarin in this paper. The comprehensive analysis of both the pitch and duration illustrated the difference in the citation tones. Our results showed that pitch is greatly impacted by age but not by gender. The tone curve is located on the top of the tone register in...

The present study compared the duration of Mandarin tones in three types of speech contexts: isolated monosyllables, formal text-reading passages, and casual conversations. A total of 156 adult speakers was recruited. The speech materials included 44 monosyllables recorded from each of 121 participants, 18 passages read by 2 participants, and 20 conversations conducted by 33 participants. The d...

The paper investigates tone realization in monosyllabic and disyllabic words in Cantonese, Cantonese-spoken Mandarin and Standard Mandarin, focusing on the deviations of tone realization in Cantonese-spoken Mandarin from standard Mandarin in monosyllabic and disyllabic words. The analysis on monosyllabic and disyllabic tone patterns shows that most of the tone deviations in Cantonese-accented M...