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This chapter describes the initial stages of development of a Pan-Mandarin ToBI system. It reviews the salient prosodic characteristics of Mandarin, such as lexical tones, tone sandhi, tonal neutralisation, stress patterns, pitch range effects, and prosodic groupings above the syllable level. Particular attention is paid to the range of variability within a common structural core, in addition to points of reference to other varieties of Chinese and to other languages. It then proposes a codification of conventions for marking prosodic structure and an inventory of tones in two standard varieties (i.e. Putonghua of Mainland China and Guoyu of Taiwan) and one regional variety of the language (i.e. Rugaohua, a Jianghuai Mandarin variety). Also built into the system is the capability to accommodate interactions, such as code-switching events, between different varieties of Mandarin and perhaps between Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese (and other languages) in different social contexts.

The present study examines the patterns of interference between a first (here, Amoy) and second language (here, Mandarin) by comparing the production of a Mandarin phone [f] (a ‘new’ phone) with another Mandarin phone [x] (which is ‘similar’ to an Amoy phone [h]) by three groups of native Amoy subjects differentiated by proficiency in Mandarin. Their Mandarin production was also compared to that of Mandarin monolinguals. The spectrum of each consonant was analyzed to show the frequency range and energy of the fricative. In general, native Amoy speakers interpreted Mandarin /f/ and /x/ in terms of their first language phones [h^w] and [h], but showed different patterns of interference for different proficiency levels. The least proficient simply substituted the Amoy phones for the Mandarin. More proficient speakers could approximate the Mandarin monolingual phonetic norm for the ‘new’ phone [f] more accurately than for the ‘similar’ phone [x]. The most proficient showed little Amoy-to-Mandarin interference on even the ‘similar’ phone [x]. On the other hand, the most proficient showed some interference from Mandarin /x/ on their Amoy production.

Taiwanese coda stop consonants are unreleased, so that their place of articulation tends to be confused with that of the initial consonant of any following syllable. This traditionally is described as place assimilation–i.e., categorical feature change. Recent phonetic theories suggest an alternative description in terms of a continuous variation in degree of coarticulatory overlap between consonants. This study investigates the production and perception of coda consonants before different following onset consonants. Productions by six subjects were analyzed using electropalatographic (EPG) and acoustic measurements. Perception was examined using the concept formation paradigm. Preliminary data suggest that apparent place assimilation in Taiwanese is a noncategorical gestural coarticulation. The latency of the second gesture with respect to the first decreased as speech rate increased, so that gestural reduction was found in the production of every subject in normal and fast speech rates. The dental gesture was deleted more frequently than the velar gesture. In the perception test, the identification of coda place became worse as the latency of the second gesture decreased, so that the coda’s gesture was overlapped more by the following onset gesture.

Speaker normalization effects using continua from ‘‘sue’’ to ‘‘shoe’’ and three experimental tasks: Identification, goodness ratings, and direct prototype estimation are compared. The continua were formed by concatenating synthetic fricative noises ranging from [s] to [sh] with the vowel portion of ‘‘sue’’ or ‘‘shoe’’ produced by a male and a female speaker. Speaker normalization was measured in the identification task as a boundary shift between responses to the ‘‘male’’ stimuli and the ‘‘female’’ stimuli. Comparison of category boundaries was also used to measure the speaker normalization effect in the goodness rating paradigm, where a stimulus was considered to be in the ‘‘s’’ category when the ‘‘goodness as [s]’’ rating was higher than the ‘‘goodness as [sh]’’ rating. Speaking normalization in the prototype estimation procedure was measured as the shift in the average estimate of the [s] or [sh] prototype. Both measures of category boundary shift showed substantial speaker normalization effects, while the magnitude of the effect in the prototype estimation task, though significant, was three to four times smaller. However, this smaller effect closely mirrors the magnitude of the acoustic difference usually found between male and female fricative. [Work supported by NIH.]