Production and Perception of Double Contour Tones in Qiyang Chinese

This paper is to study Qiyang double contours from acoustic and perceptual perspective. A noteworthy sandhi pattern and the perception experiment results indicate that Qiyang qushengs (departing tones) are underlying double contours, i.e. 4232(yinqu) and 2142(yangqu), because their falling tails are phonologically active and lexically encoded. This seriously challenges the current tone geometries [1, 3, 9], as none of them capitulate such complex tone representations. A likely solution is to represent qushengs’ downside tail as floating contour features, whose availability in lexicon and special status of being unassociated may account for qushengs’ perceptual ambiguities.