Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno [right arrow] "bù.lu.nuò"), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel [right arrow] "dan.ní.er"), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany [right arrow] "dì.fú.ní" or "dì.fen.ní"). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016)…

This dissertation studies the realization of the rhythm of Taiwan Mandarin and focuses on the quality of its unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables. Taiwan Mandarin (TM) is often described as more syllable-timed than Standard Mandarin (SM). In TM, the unstressed syllables occur less frequently. The quality of the unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables…

This dissertation investigates how the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Groups are perceived, and the acoustic/phonetics correlates of listeners' judgments. A series of perception experiments have been conducted to scrutinize the following topics--Taiwanese tone neutralization, Tone Sandhi Group (TSG) as a prosodic domain, perceived boundary strength in…