Voice quality and tonal coarticulation

A proof of submission to Language and Speech can be accessed here.

Earlier stages of this work were presented at the ASA Fall meeting 2019, Dec. 5 in Coronado, San Diego, and the 17th LabPhon 2020, July 6 virtually.

Tonal coarticulation often induces changes in F0 (Xu, 1997; Brunelle, 2009) as well as voice quality (DiCanio, 2012). In Mandarin, a tone language with four distinct pitch contours (Tone 1: high-level, 55; Tone 2: rising, 35; Tone 3: dipping, 21[4]; Tone 4: falling, 51), coarticulation has both carryover and anticipatory effects on F0. For example, in two-tone sequences, an assimilatory effect is found in the second tone, such that that has a lowered F0 when the preceding first tone has a low offset. But a dissimilatory effect is found for the first tone, which can have a raised F0 if the following second tone has a low onset (Xu, 1997; Sun & Shi, 2019). Further, Mandarin has allophonic creaky voice that covaries with F0 (Kuang, 2017). Specifically, creak in Mandarin is associated with low F0 (Kuang, 2017; Chai, 2019) and the low F0 cue is used by listeners for citation tone identification (Huang, 2020). However, few studies have investigated the connection between the changes of F0 and voice quality in tonal coarticulation. Thus, this study asks how F0 raising and lowering due to tonal coarticulation affect voice quality in Mandarin. We address this question using acoustic and electroglottographic (EGG) analyses.