The influence of tonal categories and prosodic boundaries on the creakiness in Mandarin

Abstract

This study examines the distribution of creaky voice as a function of various prosodic structures in a large-scale corpus of continuous speech of Mandarin. Both tonal categories and prosodic boundaries have strong effects on the likelihood of creak and relative creakiness. It was found that (1) creaky voice in Mandarin is indeed largely driven by the occurrence of low pitch and weakening; (2) Tone 3 sandhi and Tone 2 are different in both pitch and voice quality; (3) the creakiness of Tone 3 (low tone) and the neutral tone (weakening) is realized differently. Moreover, females and males do not differ in how they use creaky voice linguistically.