This chapter describes the initial stages of development of a Pan-Mandarin ToBI system. It reviews the salient prosodic characteristics of Mandarin, such as lexical tones, tone sandhi, tonal neutralisation, stress patterns, pitch range effects, and prosodic groupings above the syllable level. Particular attention is paid to the range of variability within a common structural core, in addition to points of reference to other varieties of Chinese and to other languages. It then proposes a codification of conventions for marking prosodic structure and an inventory of tones in two standard varieties (i.e. Putonghua of Mainland China and Guoyu of Taiwan) and one regional variety of the language (i.e. Rugaohua, a Jianghuai Mandarin variety). Also built into the system is the capability to accommodate interactions, such as code-switching events, between different varieties of Mandarin and perhaps between Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese (and other languages) in different social contexts.

This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers’ Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n = 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n = 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n = 40) took part in a multiday Mandarin‐like artificial language learning task. Participants were asked to repeat a syllable–tone combination immediately after hearing it. Half of all participants were exposed to speech from 1 talker (low variability) while the other half heard speech from 4 talkers (high variability). Half of the L1 English participants were given daily explicit instruction on Mandarin tone contours, while the other half were not. Tone accuracy was measured by L1 Mandarin raters (n = 104) who classified productions according to their perceived tonal category. Explicit instruction of tone contours facilitated L1 English participants’ production of rising and falling tone contours. High variability input alone had no main effect on participants’ productions but interacted with explicit instruction to improve participants’ productions of high‐level tone contours. These results motivate an L2 tone production training approach that consists of explicit tone instruction followed by gradual exposure to more variable speech.

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Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 26-37

The Hong Kong Cantonese variety of Chinese (hereafter "Cantonese") poses an interesting challenge for prosodic typology and transcription for three closely interrelated reasons. First, compared to the Mandarin varieties of Chinese, Cantonese has far fewer polysyllabic wordforms. The majority of the syllables are potentially free-standing morphemes, and there is no contrast between "stressed" syllables and reduced ("neutral-tone") syllables. Second, there is an extremely dense syntagmatic specification of tone. Every syllable in an utterance has a lexical tone, even if it is a grammatical morpheme or pragmatic particle, and there is a rich inventory of non-segmental pragmatic morphemes ("boundary tones")