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INTERSPEECH
2010

Exploring the mechanism of tonal contraction in taiwan Mandarin

12 years 10 months ago
Exploring the mechanism of tonal contraction in taiwan Mandarin
This study investigates the mechanism of tonal contraction when a disyllabic unit is merged into a monosyllable at fast speech rate in Taiwan Mandarin. Various degrees of contraction of bi-tonal sequences were elicited by manipulating speech rates. Functional Data Analysis was performed to compare trajectories of F0 and velocity in the contracted and non-contracted syllables. Preliminary results show that speakers always make an effort to produce the original tones, even in cases of extreme degrees of reduction. This finding militates against phonology-based accounts like the Edge-in model, according to which contraction is a process of deleting adjacent tonemes while leaving the non-adjacent tonemes intact.
Chierh Cheng, Yi Xu, Michele Gubian
Added 18 May 2011
Updated 18 May 2011
Type Journal
Year 2010
Where INTERSPEECH
Authors Chierh Cheng, Yi Xu, Michele Gubian
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