Speech errors and the representation of tone in Mandarin Chinese

On the phonological organization of Mandarin tones

“…Wan (1996), Jaeger (1998), andWan (1999) presented evidence regarding the representation and processing of tone in Mandarin Chinese by examining a corpus of speech errors collected in a naturalistic setting; some of the errors were subjected to spectrographic analysis to demonstrate an accurate perception of what had been spoken. Findings in Wan and Jaeger (1998) are summarized as follows: (1) When a lexical item or word is substituted for another, the error item or word always retains its underlying tone. (2) After lexical items have been inserted into syntactic frames and their phonological representations activated, phonological processing occurs, and during this processing, segments and tones are unlinked so that they will be involved in errors independently from each other.…”

“…Moser (1991), Shen (1992Shen ( , 1993 and Yang (1997) all provided a thorough investigation of linguistic components in speech errors and documented the existence of tone errors in Beijing Mandarin. Wan and Jaeger (1998), and Wan (1999) have refined the theoretical framework regarding the behavior of Mandarin tones in Taiwan by examining a corpus of spontaneous speech errors involving tones in a naturalistic setting. They concluded that in underlying representation, tones stored with phonological representations are probably linked to rhymes and remained linked during lexical insertion.…”

Contour tones and contrast in Chinese languages

“…Wan and Jaeger (1998) discuss additional data in support of this conclusion, which cannot be presented here for reasons of space.…”

“…Following another line of inquiry, Wan and Jaeger (1998) discuss speech error data, suggesting strongly that tones in Mandarin are unitary rather than a concatenation of level tones. For example, there were no tone splittings or hybrids produced by word blending or telescoping errors.…”

“…The first is that such a model generates more contour tones than are attested. The second problem concerns the fact that that contour tones behave as units, both phonologically (Yip 1989) and in experimental studies (Wan and Jaeger 1998). The Cluster model predicts that component level tones should behave independently, at least sometimes.…”