Voice quality of coarticulated Mandarin tones

Abstract

Tonal coarticulation often induces changes in F0 (Xu, 1997; Brunelle, 2009) as well as voice quality (DiCanio, 2012). In Mandarin, voice quality covaries with F0, such that when the F0 is higher or lower than the mid-range pitch, the voice quality often becomes creakier (Kuang, 2017). However, fewer studies have examined how coarticulation can affect a tone’s voice quality. Using audio and electroglottography (EGG), this study investigates how F0 and voice quality of Mandarin tones are affected by coarticulation. The stimuli consisted of trisyllabic Mandarin compounds, where each of the four Mandarin tones is flanked by varying tones, for a full range of contextual variation. We expect that the F0 of a high tone (e.g., Tone 1) would become lower when flanked by a low tone (e.g., Tone 3), whereas the F0 of a low tone would become higher when adjacent to a high tone. Moreover, the voice quality of Tone 3 that is raised in F0 should become more modal, if voice quality depends on F0. Discussion of results will emphasize how F0 and voice quality of Mandarin tones can vary according to tonal context and how articulation (as measured by EGG) informs patterns of acoustic realization.