Speaker: Xinyue Zhong (MIT)
Title: Tone sandhi in Mandarin-English bilingual speech
Time: Monday, May 6th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: When bilingual speakers mix languages in their speech, two phonologies come into contact in real time, which raises the question of how potential incompatibilities between the two phonologies are resolved. This study investigates one such potential incompatibility concerning how Mandarin-English bilinguals handle Mandarin tone sandhi when the trigger is a word in English. Existing research (Cheng 1968, Gao and Wu 2022) suggests that tone sandhi can be triggered by English words based on pitch similarity. Nevertheless, my previous experiment (2021) additionally showed that English consonant clusters can block tone sandhi in places where sandhi is expected to apply based on pitch similarity.
Two hypotheses were proposed to explain this blocking effect: 1) an “illusory” vowel or low tone is associated with consonant clusters (cf. Dupoux et al. 1999), which interferes with the expected pitch patterns, or 2) the fact that consonant clusters are banned in Mandarin phonotactics prevents English syllables with clusters from participating in Mandarin phonological processes. A new production experiment was conducted this semester where two Mandarin tone sandhis, the Tone 3 sandhi and the bu sandhi, are tested with select English words embedded in otherwise Mandarin sentences. The results showed that neither of the hypotheses is fully consistent with the patterns in speakers’ sandhi production under the assumption that English syllables receive Mandarin tones in the tested sentences. The findings so far suggest that closer inspection of the phonetic properties of the English syllable triggers is needed, and that we might need to adjust our assumptions about what conditions tone sandhi in Mandarin.