Production and perception of Taiwan Mandarin syllable contraction.

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Taiwan Mandarin syllable contraction is an optional lenition process which involves the elision of the intervocalic segments and the merger of the tonal elements of two syllables. Here it is shown that syllable contraction is gradient and non‐neutralizing. In a production experiment, 20 subjects read a list of minimal sentence pairs, containing disyllabic contractable words and matched monosyllabic lexical words, at two speech rates (88 and 144 beats/min), three times each. Degree of contraction was measured as the depth of the intensity trough between two syllables [Mermelstein 1975], with a trough depth (TrD) of zero meaning fully contracted. 8% of disyllables were somewhat contracted (TrD between 0 and 2 dB) while 29% were fully contracted (TrD = 0 dB). Fully contracted disyllables were compared on several other acoustic measures to their monosyllabic counterparts and were found to differ most strongly in duration. In a perception experiment, items from the production experiment were presented to 35 listeners for forced‐choice identification as disyllabic or monosyllabic words. Accuracy was generally high; reaction times were slower for lexical monosyllables, which were sometimes labeled as contracted. Thus, even when fully contracted syllables were produced, they remained acoustically and perceptually distinct from monosyllables.