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In:Above and Beyond the Segments: Experimental linguistics and phonetics
Edited by Johanneke Caspers, Yiya Chen, Willemijn Heeren, Jos Pacilly, Niels O. Schiller and Ellen van Zanten
[Not in series 189] 2014
► pp. 275–287

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The independent effects of prosodic structure and information status on tonal coarticulation

Evidence from Wenzhou Chinese

 | Universiteit Leiden
Published online: 10 December 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.189.22sch
Various factors constrain the production of a sequence of lexical tones. This study aims to test the joint influence of three important ones: tonal coarticulation, prosodic structure, and information status. F0 realization of rising and falling tones, in both compatible and conflicting tonal contexts, was compared across two prosodic conditions (prosodic headedness and boundary depth) and two focus conditions (with vs. without narrow focus). Results show that in conflicting tonal contexts, where salient coarticulatory adjustment of F0 trajectories is to be expected, both prosodic structure and information status influenced the implementation of F0 slopes, albeit in different ways. These findings lend support to the proposal that information status and prosodic structure exert independent prosodic strengthening effects on tonal implementation.
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