Perception of dialectal prosody in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

This pilot study aims at answering whether prosodic cues alone can account for the differences among three regional dialects in Taiwan Mandarin, Northern, Central, and Southern, which all belong to Mandarin Chinese. Assumed that prosodic cues alone can be used for distinguishing among different Taiwan Mandarin dialects, a perception experiment was conducted. The Northern dialect was best recognized while the identification rates of the Central and the Southern dialects were slightly below chance level. Results showed the tendency that it was easier for listener to identify his or her own dialect than it was to detect other regional dialects. Gender effect was observed to play a role in the recognition of the three dialects, which led to the following-up production experiment intended for exploring the acoustic differences among these three dialects. Preliminary results examined the descriptive tonal patterns of all four lexical tones in three Taiwan Mandarin dialects. The tonal registers produced by the Northern dialect speakers were more prominent than those of the Central and the Southern dialects in that they had the highest normalized F0 values for T1 tokens and greater pitch range, or steepest slope, for the other three contour tones, compatible with the result of the perception experiment.