International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages With Emphasis on Tone Languages Beijing, China March 28-31, 2004

Tone-Vowel Interaction in Standard Chinese

Philip Hoole (1), Fang Hu (2)

(1) Phonetics Institute, Munich University, Germany
(2) Phonetics Lab, Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

The effect of tone production on the position of the articulators (tongue, jaw, lower lip) was examined by means of threedimensional electromagnetic articulography. Most differences found involved Tone 3 relative to the other tones. While /u, a/ showed retraction and lowering this pattern did not extend to all vowels. Head position during vowel production was also analyzed. Even more consistently than for the articulatory data, Tone 3 tended to differ from the other tones, showing a lower and more posterior head position. Finally, tongue and jaw influences on intrinsic pitch in Mandarin are briefly considered.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hoole, Philip / Hu, Fang (2004): "Tone-vowel interaction in standard Chinese", In TAL-2004, 89-92.