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Phonological patterns often have phonetic bases. But whether phonetic substance should be encoded in synchronic phonological grammar is controversial. We aim to test the synchronic relevance of phonetics by investigating native Mandarin speakers' applications of two exceptionless tone sandhi processes to novel words : the contour reduction 213E21/_T (Tl213), which has a clear phonetic motivation, and the perceptually neutralising 213E35/_213, whose phonetic motivation is less clear. In two experiments, Mandarin subjects were asked to produce two individual monosyllables together as two different types of novel disyllabic words. Results show that speakers apply the 213E21 sandhi with greater accuracy than the 213E35 sandhi in novel words, indicating a synchronic bias against the phonetically less motivated pattern. We also show that lexical frequency is relevant to the application of the sandhis to novel words, but cannot account alone for the low sandhi accuracy of 213E35. * This work could not have been done without the help of many people. We are grateful to Paul Boersma and Mietta Lennes for helping us with Praat scripts, Juyin Chen, Mickey Waxman and Xiangdong Yang for helping us with statistics and Hongjun Wang, Jiangping Kong and Jianjing Kuang for hosting us at Beijing University during our data collection in 2007. For helpful comments on various versions of this work, we thank Allard Jongman, James Myers, three anonymous reviewers and an associate editor for Phonology, and audiences at the 2004 NYU Workshop on ' Redefining elicitation ', the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii, the Department of Psychology and the Child Language Program at the University of Kansas, and the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.We owe a special debt to Hsin-I Hsieh, whose work on wug-testing Taiwanese tone sandhi inspired this research. All remaining errors are our own.

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The objective of this experiment was to evaluate the effects of replacement of whole-plant corn with oat and common vetch on the fermentation quality, chemical composition and aerobic stability of total mixed ration (TMR) silage in Tibet. Four TMR that varied in the forage sources on dry matter basis were used: (i) 52% whole-plant corn (Control); (ii) 43% oat + 12% common vetch (OC3.6); (iii) 38% oat + 18% common vetch (OC2.2); and (iv) 33% oat + 23% common vetch (OC1.5). Silos were opened on day 45 and then subjected to an aerobic stability test for 12 days. The results showed that all silages were well preserved with low pH and NH3-N, and high lactic acid and V-scores. With the increasing proportion of common vetch, crude protein, ether extract increased (P < 0.05), and neutral detergent fiber and acid detergent fiber decreased (P < 0.05). Under aerobic conditions, treated silages were more stable than the control silage as indicated by lower (P < 0.05) pH and yeast population. It was concluded that replacement of whole-plant corn with oat and common vetch had no unfavorable effects on the fermentation quality and improved crude protein content and aerobic stability of TMR silage. OC2.2 silage was the best among three treated TMR silages.