Linjun Liu, University of Manitoba
An Empirical Study on Beijing Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi in Terms of Lexical Frequency
This study focuses on the production and perception of sandhi tone 3 in Beijing Mandarin, and by involving lexical frequency as a parameter, it turns out a pioneering endeavor in this area of research.
12 Beijing Mandarin speakers of a homogeneous age group participated in the production experiment, a scale rarely matched in production experiments. Meanwhile, we have also carefully controlled the test items by including strict lexicons only. The paired t-test results of our production experiment show sporadic differences between sandhi tone 3 and underlying tone 2; when we take lexical frequency into consideration, however, a different picture unfolds. The ANOVA analysis results in a great increase not only in the number of critical values but also in the varieties of measurements. Thus an analogy can be made between tone sandhi in Mandarin and vowel reduction in unstressed syllables in English. We try explaining the insignificant differences between underlying tone 2 and sandhi tone 3 by proposing a balancing between “faithful” implementation of the tone target and “impassibility” of the articulatory constraints(Shen 1990; Xu 2004).
12 different speakers of Beijing Mandarin participated in the perception experiment, and the results show a high correlation between tone perception rate and lexical frequency. When the minimal pair contrastive only in the tone of the first syllable of disyllabic lexicons is equal in lexical frequency, the rate of correct perception is very close to chance accuracy; when the pair is of different lexical frequency, native speakers favor the one of higher lexical frequency. This finding seems to support Johnson’s proposal that memory for language sound patterns is lexical (2004), that is, contextually-conditioned knowledge is stored together with phonetic knowledge as a whole. In the case of tone sandhi, the speaker or listener will retrieve and compute his or her knowledge on both the underlying tone shape and the sandhi context simultaneously, instead of separately.
By relating lexical frequency to sandhi tone production and perception, this study allows us to see why tone sandhi rules come together with syntax, given the fact that tone sandhi is acquired from two years of age to five, a time when young kids are learning lexicons and building up syntactic rules at one time. This study may also help us predict how sandhi tones will evolve: those of higher frequency of use (like sandhi tone 3) will stay robust while those of lower frequency of use (like qi1-/ba1 sandhi) may one day be dropped.
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