Interaction between aspiration and tonal pitch in Weihai Chinese

Abstract

This paper considers the questions of whether, how, and by what mechanism the aspiration of voiceless stops in the syllable onset affects the pitch (F0) of lexical tone in a tone language. The literature on this topic is at odds with itself. Lai et al. [“The raising effect of aspirated prevocalic consonants on F0 in Taiwanese,” Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on East Asian Linguistics (2009)] review the history of conflicting results, with some studies reporting F0 lowering after aspirated stops, and some reporting F0 raising. Here is provided another battery of findings from another tonal dialect, Weihai Chinese. Using data from seven monodialectal female speakers, no effect of aspiration is found on tonal F0 following bilabial or alveolar stops, but a strong significant lowering effect was observed following the velar aspirated stops. A second issue addressed here has had almost nothing published about it, viz., what is the converse effect of the lexical tone pitch upon the aspiration time (VOT) of the onset stops. It was found that, in general, high-beginning tones correlated with shorter voice onset times in all stop onsets.