The effect of phrasing, speech rate, and information structure on tonal coarticulation in spontaneous Cantonese

Abstract

Pre-low raising is a tone coarticulation phenomenon in which the pitch of a high-tone syllable is higher before a low tone than before a high tone. Lee and Xu (2016) found that speech rate influences the degree of this pre-low raising, in recordings of read disyllables in carrier phrases. In the present study, we examine this phenomenon in spontaneous Hong Kong Cantonese using the CantoMap Map Task dataset (Winterstein et al., 2020), also exploring the possibility of similar effects on the realization of other tones. Along with speech rate, we also consider the possible effects on thistonal dissimilation of phrasing (relations between a syllable and the subsequent syllable), the relative location of a syllable in a sentence, and information structure (the role of the word in the map task interaction). We expect that all of these factors will influence tonal coarticulation in general, and pre-low raising in particular.