VAT of the lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese

" Thepurpose of this research was to investigate the association of vocalattack time (VAT) and tones in speakers of Mandarin Chinese, and to explore howtones initiated at different pitch levels affected VAT. SP and EGG signals weresynchronously re corded from 72 young undergraduates or postgraduates (42 femalesand 30 males) while they were reading aloud a wordlist of 50 disyllabic words attheir most comfortable pitch, loudness and rate. VAT measures revealed threefindings . (1) Vocal attack time s hows no significant difference between the commonyangping and the yangping derived from shangsheng . This, from a physiologicalperspective, supports the argument that the tone sequence 3 3 in Mandarin is indeedconverted into 2 3, nothing else. (2) The to nes of Mandarin Chinese that start fromlow pitch levels (35, 21) tend to present significantly different VAT values fromthose that start from high pitch levels (55, 51), with mean VATs of the former beingmuch longer than those of the latter. This embodi es the nonlinear contra variantrelationship between VAT and F0 at vowel onsets. (3) There are deviations orindividual differences: a small number of people do not follow this pattern.