VAT of the lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to investigate the association of vocal attack time (VAT) and tones in speakers of Mandarin Chinese, and to explore how tones initiated at different pitch levels affected VAT. SP and EGG signals were synchronously recorded from 72 young undergraduates or postgraduates (42 females and 30 males) while they were reading aloud a wordlist of 50 disyllabic words at their most comfortable pitch, loudness and rate. VAT measures revealed three findings. (1) Vocal attack time shows no significant difference between the common yangping and the yangping derived from shangsheng. This, from a physiological perspective, supports the argument that the tone sequence 3–3 in Mandarin is indeed converted into 2–3, nothing else. (2) The tones of Mandarin Chinese that start from low pitch levels (35, 21) tend to present significantly different VAT values from those that start from high pitch levels (55, 51), with mean VATs of the former being much longer than those of the latter. This embodies the nonlinear contra-variant relationship between VAT and F0 at vowel onsets. (3) There are deviations or individual differences: a small number of people do not follow this pattern.