The acoustic characteristics of the lexical tone in Malaysian Mandarin: a preliminary report / Xin Ren and Poh Shin Chiew

Mandarin, as a tone language, dramatically differs from non-tone languages in terms of the pitch target. The lexical tone not only distinguishes semantic meanings, but also it is the essential unit of intonation in Mandarin. Accordingly, it is important to understand the lexical tone system before digging into its prosodic structure. Few studies have, however, acoustically investigated the lexical tone of Malaysian Mandarin. This study aims to examine the acoustic characteristics of the lexical tone in Malaysian Mandarin, mainly on the citation tone. Referring to the research method of Chinese dialectology, a monosyllabic word list which consisted of all Middle Chinese (MC) tone categories was designed. Six female Malaysian Chinese who were fluent speakers of Mandarin participated in the reading task. The pitch realisation of four tones was summarised as below, Tone 1 is a mid-levelling tone, Tone 2 is a levelling-rising tone, Tone 3 is a dipping tone or a low-falling tone, while Tone 4 is a high-falling tone. The creaky voice was found frequently in Tone 3 and Tone 4. A falling tone with shorter duration was found in this study, basically occurred in Tone 4 of Mandarin and some syllables are derived from MC checked tones. The findings provide a fundamental understanding of tones and intonation in Malaysian Mandarin, which may help in Mandarin learning in Malaysia.