An Acoustic And Perceprual Study On The Tone-sandhi Rule And Its Producibility In Teochew Dialect

Previous studies have suggested that the low productivity of the Taiwanese tone sandhi is influenced by circular opacity.However,there are only opacity sandhi rule in the Taiwanese Hokkien tone system.It does not sufficient to prove its effect in Taiwanese sandhi rule.Therefore,this paper adopts the Chaozhou dialect with both opaque rules and transparent rules to re-examine the productivity and influencing factors of tone sandhi rules,in order to further explore the psychological reality of tone sandhi rules.Due to the lack of acoustic investigation and research on the tonal system of Teochew dialect,the results obtained will not be rigorous enough if we directly use the previous tone value to study the productivity.Therefore,this paper first describes and tests the tone system of Chaozhou dialect.This part of the experiment is the precondition of productivity experiment.The experimental results show that: 1)the Teochew tone-sandhi rule can be applied to the *AO-AO,where both syllables are actual occurring morphemes,but the disyllable is non-occurring(NAO)and also to the AG-AO,where the first syllable is an accidental gap and the second syllable is actual occurring.The former has higher productivity,while the latter has lower productivity.2)Opacity will affect the application of tone-sandhi rules in unreal words to some extent,but this influence is limited for *AO-AO.The effect on AG-AO is not obvious.In addition to opacity,the acquisition degree,the change of tone value,the degree of vocabulary familiarity and other factors affect the production of tone sandhi.3)The psychological mechanism of sandhi is not an either-or,but an intermediate state between the two mechanisms.As the speaker becomes more familiar with syllables,the computational mechanism gradually takes over.