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The present study is a small step toward a thorough understanding of the prosodic nature of the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. Specifically, this study focuses on one prosodic property of lexical tones in natural spontaneous speech: the relative pitch between two neighboring tones. The relative pitch is defined as the pitch change from one tone to another. Generally, the relative pitch can be rising, level, or falling.
This study has chosen disyllabic words as the basic units of observation. The language data are public speeches of two speakers, one male and one female. Five minutes of speech are sampled from each speaker, and disyllabic words are identified. Through One-way ANOVA analysis with Tukey-HSD post hoc tests at a significant level of .05, the relative pitch inside a word is found to vary systematically with the tone pair of the word. In general, a word's starting tone deterines its relative pitch pattern:level or falling for Mandarn tonel and tone4, rising for tone3, and rising or falling for tone2. In particular, each tone pair can be distinguished by the magnitude of its relative pitch.
Inside a disyllabic word, the intrinsic height of a lexical tone can be preserved through the relative pitch, although such intrinsic height cannot always be maintained throughout the entire speech. For this reason, the relative pitch is considered to be a prosodic feature which can preserve the identity of lexical tones under the influence of intonation in natural Mandarin speech.
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