Variation of Taiwanese tones in conversation

Abstract

In laboratory research on tonal coarticulation in Taiwanese, one study [H.-B, Lin, Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Connecticut (1988)] reported a perseveratory effect but no anticipatory effect, while another [S.-H. Peng, J. Phonetics 25, 371–400 (1997)] found a significant anticipatory effect. Peng also found tonal variation due to prosodic positions. Unlike these previous laboratory studies, this study attempts to investigate tonal coarticulation and prosodic effects on Taiwanese tones using natural conversations from the Taiwanese Spoken Corpus (Tsay and Myers, 2004), of which 56 min of recorded conversations were analyzed. Consistent with Lin, the results showed that tone is more affected by the preceding tone than by the following tone. The slope is more influenced by the preceding tone as well. As for prosodic effects, the results confirmed Peng, showing that F0 is the lowest in utterance-final position, while in other phrase-final positions it is slightly lower than in non-phrase-final position. This study thus demonstrates the results obtained in the laboratory do indeed carry over into actual conversation.