The Interplay of Perception and Phonology in Tone 3 Sandhi in Chinese Putonghua

The Tone 3 sandhi process of standard mainland Mandarin Chinese is examined in light of perceptual influences. Although articulatory simplification can explain why the process takes place, it does not explain why Tone 3 simplifies to Tone 2 & not to Tone 1 or 4, the other two simpler tones available in the language. In a perceptual experiment, Mandarin & American English speakers (N = 10 & 13, respectively) made same/different judgments on pairs of Mandarin disyllabic nonsense words with 15 tonal combinations. For both listener groups, Tones 3 & 2 were more perceptually confusable than other pairs, as measured by error rate & response latency, indicating an effect of perception on phonology. An effect of phonology on perception was also found in the Mandarin listeners, who appeared to treat each tonal contour as a single unit & ignored important phonetic cues, in contrast to the English listeners. 5 Tables, 12 Figures, 2 Appendixes, 30 References. B. Blankenship