The influence of tonal contexts in Mandarin speech production: A motor control perspective

Huang, T. 1 , Liu, Y. 1 & Chen, J. 2

1 Department of Athletic Performance, National Taiwan Normal University
2 Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University

The tones in spoken Mandarin provide an extra element to distinguish words in addition to the syllables. Speech production involves a major part of controlling the motor system to perform the appropriate tone-syllable combinations. However, there has been little research on the Mandarin tone variations from the motor control perspective. The purpose of the study was to examine the kinematic characteristics of different tones in performing different bi-tonal combinations of Mandarin. Six adult male native speakers of Taiwanese Mandarin performed 16 different reiterant speech tasks (replacing the original syllable of the word with /ba/) where one of the 16 possible bi-tonal combinations of the four tones was used and repeated for 5 times to construct the task. Each participant performed 10 trials for each task. Kinematics data on the lips were collected using a high speed camera (200 fps) and a digitizing software. Amplitudes and durations of the lower lip movements were analyzed with repeated measure ANOVAs on the individual data to examine the influence of the tonal contexts to the motor characteristics of the reiterant speech. The results show that the first word of the disyllabic words has greater influence to the following word than vice versa for amplitude and duration measures in both open and close gestures. In terms of the acoustic characteristics of the tones, the falling tones (tone 3 and 4) are influenced by the preceding tones with a higher percentage than is the rising tone (tone 2). These results provide bases to the further understanding of the influence of the tonal contexts in Mandarin speech production. Future work will continue to examine the influence of the tonal contexts to Mandarin speech production on non-native speakers from a motor control perspective.