An investigation of intervocalic affricate simplification in Mandarin

We investigate the reduction of the palatal affricate /t ͡ ɕ/ both word-initially and word-medially in spoken Mandarin, using the CALLHOME corpus of informal telephone conversations. An overwhelming majority of the tokens shows reduction in both environments. The processes of reduction include voicing, deletion of obstruent acoustic cues, glide formation, and complete deletion of the segment. We found that word-initial tokens of /t ͡ ɕ/ have a higher retention rate of affricate acoustic cues, and word-medial tokens have a higher rate of lenition to a glide. While word-initial /t ͡ ɕ/ tokens always exhibit some consonantal feature, a number of word-medial tokens show complete deletion of /t ͡ ɕ/. Additionally, the realizations of reduction were highly gradient. There were no immediately apparent regional patterns. There was no suggestion of change in apparent time or age grading effects.