On the phonological organization of Mandarin tones

Based on the analysis of 4500 Mandarin speech errors in naturalistic settings, this paper examines the phonological organization of tones in speech production and reports on several significant findings. First, at the level of phonological representation, tone errors occur just as freely as segmental errors and are likewise largely due to an adjacent syllable. In terms of directionality, perseverative tone errors are the most frequent. While substitution errors predominately involve the falling tone, contour tones in turn outnumber level tones. The analysis also indicates that tones in Mandarin do not have the same syntagmatic organizational status as lexical stresses in languages like English, as tones are more closely associated with lexical items in their underlying forms and are part of the lexical organization.