Phonation and tone in conversational Beijing Mandarin

Abstract

Previous acoustic analyses of phonation in Beijing Mandarin and closely related varieties have shown that phonatory variability in Mandarin is conditioned by lexical tone and prosody. Tone 3 (low) and tone 4 (high fall), as-well as syllables in domain-final position, have been reported to have more negative spectral tilt (particularly lower H1-H2), indicating creaky phonation. This study examines phonation in a corpus of 6752 vowels from conversational interview speech with 16 university students in the Beijing area, using four measures of spectral tilt: H1-H2, H1-A1, H1-A2, and H1-A3. The results, which diverge from findings based on laboratory speech, are possibly the first to report on spectral tilt for tone 5 (neutral tone). In mixed-effects regression models, tone 2 (high rising) has lower H1-A1, tone 3 and tone 4 have lower H1-A1 and H1-A2, and tone 5 has lower values of H1-H2 and H1-A1. Prosodic position interacts with tone. IP-final syllables for each tone exhibit higher spectral tilt on some measures than non-final syllables, though main effects for prosodic position give lower values in IP-final position for H1-A1, H1-A2, and H1-A3. These results encourage more attention to the interaction of prosodic and tonal factors in naturalistic speaking contexts when studying phonation.