Production and perception of lexical tones in Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin.

Abstract

The acoustic properties of four lexical tones between two regional varieties of Mandarin Chinese, Beijing Mandarin (Putonghua), and Taiwan Mandarin (Guoyu) were examined in terms of duration, pitch contours, and rms amplitude. Tokens included CV and V monosyllables, representing each of the four tones of Mandarin Chinese, and were produced in isolation and in sentence context by 15 adult native speakers. A different durational pattern of citation tones emerged for two dialect variety groups. In Taiwan Mandarin, it was T2>T1>T3>T4; whereas, it was T3>T2>T1>T4 in Beijing Mandarin [Deng et al. (2006)]. The durational discrepancy in isolated T3 may be related to different realization of T3 between two dialect groups. While T3 exhibited a falling-rising pitch contour in Beijing Mandarin, it was falling in Taiwan Mandarin. Such dialectal divergence in T3 contours shapes can be verified from the amplitude contours. Furthermore, pitch contours of other tones in two dialects will be compared to see if there is tonetic sound change in other Taiwan Mandarin tones. These surface acoustic variations in linguistically identical categories can result in perceptually ambiguous tones. A gating experiment was utilized to examine how native and non-native listeners adapt to speaker and dialect variability in the stimuli.