Creaky phonation and Mandarin 214-Sandhi

Abstract

Mandarin has four contrastive tones (55, 35, 214, and 51). The 214 tone is consistently produced at the lowest part of a speaker’s pitch range, and is therefore frequently accompanied by allophonic creaky phonation. Additionally, Mandarin has a complex system of tone sandhi; the type of sandhi being investigated in this paper is whereby, when two adjacent 214 tones are uttered, the first 214 changes to a 35, and the second 214 changes to a 21. Twenty speakers of Mandarin were recorded at the campus of Peking University using a sentence list constructed to elicit minimal pairs between sandhi-unaffected and sandhi-affected 214 tones. Age and gender were not considered a contributing factor to the presence of 214-linked creak, and so such factors were not controlled for. Preliminary results show that there is no significant difference between the amount of creak on affected and unaffected vowels. Therefore, the duration spent uttering the vowel at a lower pitch did not increase the intensity of creak. Howeve...