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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17337 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17337/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Word-specific tonal realizations in Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07006/) (2024)
- [The realization of tones in spontaneous spoken Taiwan Mandarin: a corpus-based survey and theory-driven computational modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23163/) (2025)
- [On the Evolution of Syntactic Information Encoded by BERT's Contextualized Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11492/) (2021)
- [A note on the modeling of the effects of experimental time in psycholinguistic experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13786/) (2021)
- [Resolving Regular Polysemy in Named Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09758/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Using embeddings to predict spoken word duration and pitch in Mandarin monosyllabic words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02002/) (2026)
- [Phonetic and semantic analyses of spoken corpora of Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin indicate that the neutral tone is a lexical tone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26360/) (2026)
- [Word meaning co-determines vowel-inherent spectral change. A corpus-based investigation of conversational Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21391/) (2026)
- [Letters hide the truth from our eyes: English homophones have meaningfully different phonetic realizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26749/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.