An acoustic study on Mandarin second tone variation among native Beijing speakers

Abstract

The Mandarin second tone is a crucial cue to the differentiation of lexical meaning, marked by a rising pitch contour. Though native speakers generally produce the tone relatively consistently, subtle variation is inevitable in spontaneous speech. This study examines the acoustic properties of second tone production among ten native Beijing speakers aged 20–35, selected through purposive sampling due to their confirmed Beijing Mandarin backgrounds. Speech data were collected through controlled pronunciation tasks: a list of monosyllabic and disyllabic words, and pitch onset, pitch range, rising slope, and contour shape analyzed using Praat Software. In total, measurable variation among speakers is found. Almost 40% of subjects showed narrower pitch rises than the standard reference contour, about 30% had exaggerated rising contour rise, while the rest of the speakers showed irregular fluctuations in contour, especially in connected speech. Such variations appear to result from individual vocal habits and speech rhythm than to dialect influence. The results imply that the tonal realization of the same tonal category is not consistent among native speakers, and this variation should be regarded as part of natural phonetic variation. This study contributes to Chinese phonetics, tone perception research, and Mandarin pedagogy by emphasizing the importance of incorporating native tonal variation into pronunciation models and teaching materials.