Tonal Target and Peak Delay in Mandarin Neutral Tone.

We examined the tonal target of the neutral tone syllable, F0 peak delay and the F0 preplanning process in production of Mandarin neutral tone by manipulating the number of neutral tone syllables and the preceding tonal contexts. The results showed that 1) the tonal target of neutral tone was L; 2) its realization was greatly influenced by the number of neutral tone syllables, as well as the prosodic structure; 3) the F0 pattern of the neutral tone depended on the tonal target of the proceeding non-neutral syllable. Specifically, the interpolation rule realized between the end position of F0 in T1 and T4, or the Peak Delay in T2 and T3, and the target position of neutral tone; and 4) with the increasing number of neutral syllables, the initial F0 in the prosodic unit also increased accordingly, indicating that our pitch preplanning ability was closely related to the prosodic structure.