The Phonetic Realizations of the Mandarin Phoneme Inventory: The Canonical and the Variants

Acoustic and articulatory variation of Mandarin diphthong /ou/

“…However, Lin (2007) also argued that the monophthongization of /ou/ does not 1. According to Fon (2020), the only vowel difference across dialects of Mandarin could be the retroflex/rhotacized vowel /ɚ/, as er-suffixation is almost not existent in Mandarin as spoken in Taiwan and Singapore. 2.…”

Articulatory characterisation of Singapore Mandarin tones using ultrasound

“…These substitutions resulted in combinations which are "clear violations of Mandarin phonotactics" (p. 114). While such variability in sibilant realisation is also observed in Taiwan Mandarin, this phenomenon is far more prevalent in Singapore Mandarin with the spontaneous speech of Singaporean males showing near-complete deretroflexion (Fon, 2020). Ng (1983) and Lock (1989) observed a similar pattern where Singapore Mandarin speakers produced more retroflex tokens during formal word-reading tasks than in casual speech.…”

“…As with the standard Beijing Mandarin, Singapore Mandarin also utilises four basic lexical tones to differentiate word meanings. Several studies (Chen, 1983;Choo, 2015;Fon, 2020;Lock, 1989) proposed the existence of an additional tone in Singapore Mandarin, however. This tone was observed to occur only in specific syllables etymologically bearing the Middle Chinese rusheng "entering tone," and was described being similar to Tone 4 in its falling fo contour.…”