On the Tonal Inventory of the Taiwanese Language: A Perceptual Study

Abstract

It is generally accepted amongst Taiwanese scholars that syllables in the Taiwanese language take on one of seven lexical tones, and these seven tones are frequently cited in the major Taiwanese dictionaries. Five tones are known to occur on sonorant-final syllables and the remaining two on non-sonorant final syllables. This study employs a set of perception experiments to demonstrate that the class of non-sonorant final syllables are undistinguishable from the class of sonorant-final syllables when cued on fundamental frequency. Subjects are only able to separate the two classes when the rate of intensity decay is significantly different. Sonorant final syllables have a much slower rate of intensity decay than non-sonorant final syllables. These results suggest that the Taiwanese language consists of five distinct lexical tones and that the Taiwanese syllables aggregate suprasegmental attributes that take on one of seven distinct states. Each state is determined from a combination of f0 and intensity information. Tone sandhi effects can be explained as suprasemental state transitions. The findings confirm that there exist only five lexical tones in the Taiwanese language, echoing the phonemic view that tones with non-sonorant final syllables are allophonic tones of tones with sonorant-final syllables.