ExploringtheMechanismofTonalContractioninTaiwan：探索台湾色调的收缩机制.pdfVIP

INTERSPEECH 2010 Exploring the Mechanism of Tonal Contraction in Taiwan Mandarin 1 1 2 Chierh Cheng , Yi Xu , Michele Gubian 1 Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, UK 2 Centre for Language Speech Technology, Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL Chierh.Cheng@,Yi.Xu@ucl.ac.uk,M.Gubian@let.ru.nl Abstract 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 Figure 2: An Edge-in approach to derive the output tone 53 show that speakers always make an effort to produce the from two source syllables, ex. /kən55/ + /pən213/ /kəm53/, original tones, even in cases of extreme degrees of reduction. This finding militates against phonology-based accounts like means “basically ” (the bilabial plosive /p/ gives rise to a the Edge-in model, according to which contraction is a process rea