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Proceedings of the XIII International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. pp. 668-671. 1995
Recently, Xu (1993a, 1993b) found that the f0 contour of a tone in Mandarin is perturbed differently by the tone preceding it than by the tone following it: the influence of the preceding tone (carryover effect) is assimilatory -- the beginning of the f0 contour of a tone becomes similar to the ending pitch value of the preceding tone; the influence of the following tone (anticipatory effect) is mostly dissimilatory -- the f0 maximum of a tone dissimilates from the f0 minimum of the following tone. The present study examines the effect of emphatic accent on different syllables in disyllabic words in order to learn more about the nature of contextual tonal variation. In particular, carryover assimilation is expected to be enhanced by emphasis on the first syllable due to the nature of this effect found in the previous study, whereas the anticipatory dissimilation is expected to be enhanced by emphasis on either the first or the second syllable, depending on the actual nature of this effect.
Native speakers of Mandarin produced the disyllabic sequence /mama/ with different tone combinations. They were requested to produce those utterances with emphasis on the first or last syllable, or with no emphasis on either syllable. Various f0 measurements were taken, including maximum and minimum f0 values and f0 values at different locations in the vowel and the nasal segments.
Comparisons among the three accent conditions confirms that carryover assimilation is strongest when the first syllable is emphasized. However, a new effect is also found when the first syllable is emphasized: Tone 3, which has the lowest minimum f0, exerts an additional dissimilation effect on the following tone, raising rather than lowering a certain portion of its f0 contour. As for the anticipatory effect, dissimilation is found in all three accent conditions, but the magnitude of the effect is strongest when the second syllable receives accent. In a word, for both carryover and anticipatory effects, the accented syllables are found to exert greater influence on the unaccented syllables than the other way around, regardless of the nature of the influence.