Form and meaning co-determine the realization of tone in Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous speech: the case of T2-T3 and T3-T3 tone sandhi

Previous studies have noted that this sandhi process may be incomplete, in the sense that the assimilated Tone 3 is still distinct from a true Tone 2. While Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi is widely studied using carefully controlled laboratory speech (Xu 1997) and formal registers of Beijing Mandarin (Yuan and Y. Chen 2014), less is known about its realization in spontaneous speech, and about the effect of contextual factors on tonal realization. The present study investigates the pitch contours of two-character words with T2-T3 and T3-T3 tone patterns in spontaneous Taiwan Mandarin conversations.