Effect of tone sandhi on singing in Chaozhou dialect

The Chaozhou dialect is a branch of Southern Min Chinese with eight tones and a wealth of tone sandhi. In this paper we explore whether there is a tone-sandhi effect on melodic construction and tone realisation in Chaozhou song, using a corpus analysis and observational study. Outcomes from the corpus analysis show a strikingly higher rate of tone-melody matching in Sandhi dataset than that in Citation dataset. In the observational study, we found significant differences between sandhi form and citation form concerning tones /53/ and /21/, but no significant difference for tones /35/ and /213/. Results suggest that falling tones in the final position of a phrase tended to exhibit a larger contoural range, and that tones in non-final positions may be more affected by the pitches of tones that precede or follow them.

Electrophysiological Signatures of Perceiving Alternated Tone in Mandarin Chinese: Mismatch Negativity to Underlying Tone Conflict

Although phonological alternation is prevalent in languages, the process of perceiving phonologically alternated sounds is poorly understood, especially at the neurolinguistic level. We examined the process of perceiving Mandarin 3rd tone sandhi (T3 + T3 → T2 + T3) with a mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment. Our design has two independent variables (whether the deviant undergoes tone sandhi; whether the standard and the deviant have matched underlying tone). These two independent variables modulated ERP responses in both the first and the second syllables. Notably, despite the apparent segmental conflict between the standard and the deviant in all conditions, MMN is only observed when neither the standard nor the deviant undergoes tone sandhi, suggesting that discovering the underlying representation of an alternated sound could interfere with the generation of MMN. A tentative model with three hypothesized underlying processing mechanisms is proposed to explain the observed latency and amplitude differences across conditions. The results are also discussed in light of the potential electrophysiological signatures involved in the process of perceiving alternated sounds.

Khoekhoegowab tone sandhi: New experimental evidence

Khoekhoegowab has a tone sandhi process that replaces each underlying tonal melody with an arbitrary secondary melody. This process at first appears to be an unusual example of a "left-dominant" sandhi process in the sense of Yue-Hashimoto (1987) or Zhang (2007). Within a given domain, the leftmost word retains its base from, but the other words undergo paradigmatic substitution; left-dominant systems typically involve spreading of a tonal melody rather than substitution. However, this description of Khoekhoegowab sandhi seems to break down when we consider verbs. Prior descriptions disagree as to whether verb sandhi depends on the placement of a tense-marking clitic (Haacke 1999) or the embedding status of the clause (Brugman 2009). This paper presents the results of a new prosodic production experiment aimed at resolving this conflict. The result is a hybrid generalization: verbs in matrix clauses undergo sandhi when preceded by a tense marker, but verbs in embedded clauses resist sandhi across the board. Thus, Khoekhoegowab continues to look like an exceptional left-dominant system: The verb and tense marking form a sandhi domain in matrix clauses (triggering sandhi on the verb whenever it is not leftmost within that domain), but in embedded clauses verbs form their own independent domain instead.

Phonetically Grounded Structural Bias in Learning Tonal Alternations

This study investigates the hypothesis that tone alternation directionality becomes a basis of structural bias for tone alternation learning, where “structural bias” refers to a tendency to prefer uni-directional tone deletions to bi-directional ones. Two experiments were conducted. In the first, Mandarin speakers learned three artificial languages, with bi-directional tone deletions, uni-directional, left-dominant deletions, and uni-directional, right-dominant deletions, respectively. The results showed a learning bias toward uni-directional, right-dominant patterns. As Mandarin tone sandhi is right-dominant while Cantonese tone change is lexically restricted and does not have directionality asymmetry, a follow-up experiment trained Cantonese speakers either on left- or right-dominant deletions to see whether the right-dominant preference was due to L1 transfer from Mandarin. The results of the experiment also showed a learning bias toward right-dominant patterns. We argue that structural simplicity affects tone deletion learning but the simplicity should be grounded on phonetics factors, such as syllables’ contour-tone bearing ability. The experimental results are consistent with the findings of a survey on other types of tone alternation’s directionality, i.e., tone sandhi across 17 Chinese varieties. This suggests that the directionality asymmetry found across different tone alternations reflects a phonetically grounded structural learning bias.

Directionality of Disyllabic Tone Sandhi across Chinese Dialects is Conditioned by Phonetically-Grounded Structural Simplicity

Despite various work which aimed to identify the phonetic and structural underpinning of tone sandhi directionality, the underlying mechanism that governs tone sandhi remains unknown. We note that the two widely discussed properties of tone sandhi, their phonetic grounds and directionality, correspond to two types of cognitive biases widely investigated in segmental phonology, namely substantive bias and structural bias respectively. This study examines structural simplicity and phonetic naturalness of tone sandhi patterns across seventeen Chinese varieties. Based on a structure-based analysis, we show that tone sandhi patterns are overwhelmingly uni-directional (i.e. structurally simple) either throughout a sandhi system or within each grammatical category. Crucially, uni-directionality is largely right-dominant, which could be attributed to its phonetic grounding. We argue that structural simplicity grounded on phonetic substance better captures tone sandhi asymmetries and such phonetically-grounded structural simplicity bias is reflected in the asymmetries of Chinese tone sandhi directionality.

Tone Sandhi Domain is not a Foot in Standard Mandarin: Evidence from the Perceptual Side

There is a long debate on whether or not the tone sandhi domain in Standard Mandarin should be treated as a metrical foot. According to the hypothesis that the tone sandhi domain is the metrical foot (Duanmu, 2007), a tone sandhi pattern can be used to infer the position of stress. However, this study shows that, despite changing the domain over which tone sandhi occurs, stress pattern remains unchanged perceptually for native speakers of Standard Mandarin. This finding conforms to the results of previous production experiments that show that the stress position remains consistent for utterances with different morpho-syntactic structures (Jia, 2011; Lai et al., 2010). Therefore, the tone sandhi domain is non-isomorphic with the stress domain in Standard Mandarin.