A new kid on the block: Distributional semantics predicts the word-specific tone signatures of monosyllabic words in conversational Taiwan Mandarin speech

• GAMs reveal new insights into tonal realization in conversational Mandarin. • The detailed tonal realization of monosyllabic words is co-determined by semantics. • Several heterographic homophones have systematically distinct F0 contours. • Phonological tones play a minor role in spontaneous conversational speech. • Their effect is mostly constrained to pitch height except for T4. We present a corpus-based investigation of how the pitch contours of monosyllabic words are realized in spontaneous conversational Mandarin, focusing on the effects of words’ meanings. We used the generalized additive model to decompose a given observed pitch contour into a set of component pitch contours that are tied to different control variables and semantic predictors. Even when variables such as word duration, gender, speaker identity, tonal context, vowel height, and utterance position are controlled for, the effect of word remains a strong predictor of tonal realization. We present evidence that this effect of word is a semantic effect: word sense is shown to be a better predictor than word, and heterographic homophones are shown to have different pitch contours. The strongest evidence for the importance of semantics is that the pitch contours of individual word tokens can be predicted from their contextualized embeddings with an accuracy that substantially exceeds a permutation baseline. For phonetics, distributional semantics is a new kid on the block. Although our findings challenge standard theories of Mandarin tone, they fit well within the theoretical framework of the Discriminative Lexicon Model.