Tonal effects on voice onset time: Stops in Mandarin and Hakka

This study examines the influence of lexical tone upon voice onset time (VOT) in Mandarin and Hakka. Examination of VOT values for Mandarin and Hakka word-initial stops /p, t, k, p^h, t^h, k^h/ followed by three vowels /i, u, a/ in different lexical tones revealed that lexical tone has a significant influence on the VOTs. The result is important because it suggests that future studies should take its influence into account when studying VOT values for stops in tonal languages. In Mandarin, stops' VOTs, ordering from the longest to the shortest, are in Tone 2, Tone 3, Tone 1, and Tone 4: this sequence is the same as Liu, Ng, Wan, Wang, and Zhang's (2008) [1] results. However, later it was found that the sequence results from the existence of non-words. Because in order to produce non-words correctly, participants tended to pronounce them at a lower speed, especially those in Tone 2. Therefore, we further examined the data without non-words, in which no clear sequence had been found. For Hakka, Post hoc tests (Scheffe) show that aspirated stops in Tones 4 and 8 have significantly shorter VOT values than they have in other tones.