The impact of prosodic boundary and information structure on tonal coarticulation in spontaneous Cantonese

The current study examines the presence of PLR in spontaneous Hong Kong Cantonese using the CantoMap Map-Task dataset and explores the influences of prosodic boundaries and information structure (the givenness of a word in the discourse) using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs). The findings confirm the presence of PLR in spontaneous speech. Moreover, the study demonstrates that PLR is stronger in the absence of a prosodic boundary, indicating the substantial influence of prosodic boundaries on tonal coarticulation. Furthermore, the study examines how the f0 of the following syllable impacts the f0 realization of the preceding syllable, revealing a correlation between the phonetic context and the realization of tonal coarticulation.