Temporal location of syllabic tonal target in standard Chinese

Abstract

The understanding of the dynamic nature of the syllable has been deepened by investigating the P center/stress beat and segmental target concentration (Ren, 1986). This study is concerned with another feature, the temporal location of syllabic tonal target in a tone language, Chinese. Chinese has four syllabic tones with the phonological forms H, LH, L, HL, respectively, realized by changes in F0. Our acoustic data from three speakers shows that (1) in contrast to the anticipatory cross-syllable coarticulation at the segmental level, the cross-syllable tonal transition is a carryover, (2) with a conflicting preceeding tonal context, the temporal location of the only tonal target in H and L and the first target in LH and HL depends on the rate of F0 transition starting from the syllable onset, (3) with a harmonic preceding tonal context, the first target in LH and HL is located very close to the consonant offset or the vowel onset. The relations between P center/stress beat and tonal target in case (3) call for further investigation.