Complete tonal neutralization in Taiwan southern Min

Abstract

This study reported the result of a production experiment on the tonal neutralization of context unchecked 21 tone and checked 21 tone with a glottal stop coda in Taiwan Southern Min, which are said to be realized the same as a high falling sandhi tone 51 on surface when occurring in context positions. Speakers of two age groups, younger and older, were recruited for the production experiments to examine whether the neutralization is complete. The comparison between the f0 contours was conducted with smoothing spline analysis of variance, and it showed a case of complete neutralization for both age groups, where the two f0 contours were simply overlapped. As reported by linear mixed effects modeling, the durations of the target syllables with underlying checked and unchecked 21 tones were not significantly different from each other.