On neutral-tone syllables in Mandarin Chinese

One of the characteristic and hard to be grasped features in Mandarin Chinese is the so-called neutral-tone (hereafter NT) syllables, which is neutralized from corresponding normal stressed syllables. Perceptually, The NT syllable sounds quite weak, and must be attached to other syllable as a dependent morpheme in polysyllabic words. However, it does not equal to the unstressed syllables in common, in stead, it forms an important morphophonemic contrast to the normal type one in bisyllabic words. Consequently, it might be of benefit to Chinese speech processing to clarify the phonetic nature of the NT syllables. Many relevant approaches from different viewpoint have been contributed before, this study is concerned in their phonetic characteristics. The discussion is based on a relevant acoustic measurements and analysis referred to a corpus of materials including over 200 of NT syllables, all of them are occurred as second morpheme in different category of neutral type bisyllabic words. The hypothesis is that the perceptual feature of the NT syllables may be caused by a combination of multiple acoustic effects, in stead of any single factor. Therefore, this kind of syllables must own their special acoustic patterns