Effects of syllable position on F0 and duration in Mandarin disyllabic words

In a previous attempt to fit a pitch target approximation model for F0 contours in Mandarin disyllabic words [Xu et al. (1999)], it was found that the implementation of tonal targets required two sets of values for the model parameters, one for each of the two syllable positions. This suggests that syllable position may have an effect on the production of the syllable. The present study is designed to further examine this position effect. One-hundred-eleven disyllabic words with various tonal combinations were read by native Mandarin speakers with two carrier sentences. Duration and F0 analyses were performed. Preliminary results indicate that a syllable has longer duration, higher F0, and closer-to-ideal F0 shape when it is in the first position than in the second position. These results agree with previous acoustic-phonetics findings about Mandarin disyllabic words, and together they seem to suggest that the first syllable in a disyllabic word is more stressed than the second one. Interestingly, this appears to be at odds with current phonological theories about Mandarin prosody, which maintain that the second syllable carries greater weight than the first in a disyllabic foot. Possible causes for this discrepancy will be discussed.