The production and perception of Low Tone Alternations in Huaiyuan Chinese

Huaiyuan Mandarin is a Mandarin dialect that has three low-tone sandhi rules. T1 (low-falling) and T3 (low falling-rising) sandhis involve changing the first low tone to a mid-rising tone when two low tones occur consecutively, which may lead to neutralization between the sandhi tones and T2 (mid-rising). Huaiyuan half-third sandhi involves abridging the rising portion of the first T3 when it is followed by a non-low tone, which may bring about neutralization between half-T3 and T1. Given the complexity, this study investigates the tonal neutralization between Huaiyuan sandhi tones and their corresponding non-sandhi tones in disyllabic words. For each tone sandhi, 10 sandhi words and 10 non-sandhi words differing only in the first underlying tones were compared. Acoustic and identification results showed that sandhi-T3 and T2 were completely neutralized, while sandhi-T1 and T2, as well as half-T3 and T1 were not neutralized in production or perception. Discrimination results revealed that native listeners outperformed non-Huaiyuan listeners in differentiating between half-T3 and T1, suggesting higher-level linguistic knowledge was used by the native listeners for the perception of Huaiyuan sandhi words. These results indicate different degrees of phonetic and phonological motivations among the three low-tone sandhis in Huaiyuan Mandarin.