The nature of tone sandhi in Sixian Hakka

Abstract

Sixian Hakka is a Hakka dialect spoken in Taiwan. The language has four contrastive tones on non-checked syllables: 24, 11, 31, and 55. But before 24 or 55, a tone sandhi pattern changes 24 to 11, neutralizing the tonal contrast to three. We report two experiments that tap into the nature of this tone sandhi pattern in this paper. The first is a nonce-probe test, in which participants produced novel words that met the sandhi environment (/24-24/, /24-55/), and the f0 of the first syllable was compared to the f0 produced in real words to test the productivity of the sandhi. The second is an auditory lexical decision experiment with auditory priming, which tested whether disyllabic tone sandhi words were primed by monosyllables that shared the base tone or sandhi tone of the first syllable. Both experiments were conduced in Miaoli, Taiwan. We will report data from 15 participants for the first experiment and 32 for the second experiments. Together with experimental studies on various types of tone sandhi patterns elsewhere (e.g., Mandarin, Taiwanese), the results here will shed further light on how speakers internalize complex tonal alternation. The study also provides experimental data on an understudied and disenfranchised language.