Form and meaning co-determine the realization of tone in Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous speech: the case of T2-T3 and T3-T3 tone sandhi

TL;DR

This study investigates how tone sandhi in spontaneous Taiwan Mandarin speech is influenced by contextual factors, revealing that T3-T3 tones become indistinguishable from T2-T3 tones when considering word and sense effects.

Contribution

It provides new insights into spontaneous speech tone realization and demonstrates the influence of word and sense on tone sandhi using advanced statistical modeling.

Findings

T3-T3 tones become indistinguishable from T2-T3 tones in spontaneous speech.

Contextual factors like word and sense significantly affect tone realization.

Complete sandhi occurs when these factors are considered.

Abstract

In Standard Chinese, Tone 3 (the dipping tone) becomes Tone 2 (rising tone) when followed by another Tone 3. Previous studies have noted that this sandhi process may be incomplete, in the sense that the assimilated Tone 3 is still distinct from a true Tone 2. While Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi is widely studied using carefully controlled laboratory speech (Xu, 1997) and more formal registers of Beijing Mandarin (Yuan & Y. Chen, 2014), less is known about its realization in spontaneous speech, and about the effect of contextual factors on tonal realization. The present study investigates the pitch contours of two-character words with T2-T3 and T3-T3 tone patterns in spontaneous Taiwan Mandarin conversations. Our analysis makes use of the Generative Additive Mixed Model (GAMM, Wood, 2017) to examine fundamental frequency (F0) contours as a function of normalized time. We consider various factors known to influence pitch contours, including gender, duration, word position, bigram probability, neighboring tones, speaker, and also novel predictors, word and word sense (Chuang et al., 2025). Our analyses revealed that in spontaneous Taiwan Mandarin, T3-T3 words become indistinguishable from T2-T3 words, indicating complete sandhi, once the strong effect of word (or word sense) is taken into account.