Tonal alignment in Shanghai Chinese

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the tonal alignment in open syllable (CV) and closed syllable (CV?) starting with nasal consonant /m/ and with rising/falling F0 contours in Shanghai Chinese. Results show that a glottal coda shortens the duration of vowel significantly and in order to keep the isochronism of syllable, the duration of nasal consonant /m/ showed a significant compensatory lengthening effect, which makes the duration of consonant longer than vowel in closed syllables. As the onset of tone (rise/fall) normally stayed around the center of the host syllable [12], the onset of tone in closed syllable (T5) located within the nasal consonant /m/, which indicated that the implementation of tone started from the onset of its host syllable rather than from the onset of the rhyme and verified that the whole syllable was the tone carrier.