Tonal and duratonal variations as phonetic coding for syllable grouping

While syllables in connected speech are generally believed to be prosodically divided into groups, how such grouping is done phonetically is not fully understood. This study explores the possibility that syllable grouping is partly realized through adjusting articulatory strength and duration. We compared the degrees of tonal undershoot in Mandarin as they are related to syllable position and number of syllables in words or phrases. The sequences consisted of 1--4 syllables with R or F tone and were produced by eight speakers. The all-R and all-F sequences impose great pressure on tone production and hence would best reveal the effects of strength and duration. Results show that as the number of syllables in each sequence increased, both syllable duration and size of F0 excursion decreased. Meanwhile, excursion size varied with syllable location in the sequence. But in each case it was the first and last syllables that had the largest excursions, and the excursion variations cannot be fully accounted for by duration. There thus appear to be both an isochrony effect and an ``edge marking'' effect. Taking into consideration known prosodic effects on segmental phonemes, syllable grouping as a communicative function seems to involve a rather complex encoding scheme.

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