2008/06/04

Shen, X. S., & Lin, M. (1991). Concepts of Tone in Mandarin Revisited: A perceptual Study on Tonal Coarticulation. Language Science, 13, 3/4, 421-432.

Presentation: Chris

Summary: Angela

This paper serves to refute the concept of Mandarin tones being sheer anticipatory when preceded by a voiced consonant or a non-syllabic vowel, which was a concept proposed by Howie (1974) in his pioneer study on Mandarin Tones. The authors disagree with this viewpoint as they believed that such a claim would only hold when Mandarin tones were studied in isolation forms, which was what Howie (1974) did at that time. In this study, by studying Mandarin tones in sentential contexts, the authors proved that Mandarin tones were not only anticipatory, but also preservatory as the perceptual experiment they conducted showed that listeners were able to perceive the F₀ perturbations occurring at tonal onsets above the chance-level. Also, this study showed that both syllables starting with an initial vowel or consonant would undergo perturbation. This finding disagreed with Howie’s (1974) as his study showed that only syllables with initial consonants would undergo perturbation. Finally, the authors suggested from their findings that there is a many-to-one relation between acoustic values and phonological tones. Though the concept of many-to-one relation may seem apparent nowadays as it is explained by quantal theory and others, it should be viewed as an innovation at that time.