Production of Tone 3 Sandhi by Advanced Korean Learners of Mandarin

Abstract

Many studies have found that native Mandarin speakers produce T3 sandhi in a non-neutralized way, with the sandhi tone not fully merged into its sandhi target. This makes it interesting to investigate whether advanced learners of Mandarin will produce T3 sandhi in a similar or different way as well as reasons underlying it. Results from this carefully controlled experimental study show that advanced Korean learners of Mandarin produce T3 sandhi in a neutralized way, in contrast to non-neutralized production by native Mandarin speakers. This is probably due to Korean speakers’ learning of the explicit T3 sandhi rule in their L2 learning program, as compared to the implicit learning of the T3 sandhi rule by Mandarin speakers. Though Korean speakers produce T3 sandhi in a neutralized way, their production of sandhi T3 is found to be overall flatter in f0 curve than that of native Mandarin speakers; this is consistent with their production of Mandarin lexical T2, the base tone of the sandhi target T2. This finding suggests that these advanced L2 learners’ sandhi production is restrained by the way they produce Mandarin lexical tones.