Stability of Tone 2 F0 Contours across Different Syllable Structures in Mandarin

The syllables of Mandarin are usually divided into four different structures. Previous studies on adults and children reported the features of F0 contours across different syllable structures in Mandarin. This paper presents the stability of some parameters of Tone 2 F0 contours across different syllable structures. The indicator of stability for F0 is Standard Deviation (SD) while the parameters include syllable duration, initial duration, time of maximum/minimum F0 and maximum/minimum frequency F0. In order to observe the stability of the tone, four native speakers of Beijing Mandarin were recorded using the same syllable table for Tone 2. This experiment found that the SDs for time of minimum F0 correlated with the syllable structures, and the SDs for the most complex syllables were higher than other syllables. However, the other parameters did not show correlation with their syllable structures.