# Word meaning co-determines vowel-inherent spectral change. A corpus-based investigation of conversational Mandarin

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21391 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21391/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Predicting Prosodic Prominence from Text with Pre-trained Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02262/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Resolving Regular Polysemy in Named Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09758/) (2024)
- [A new kid on the block: Distributional semantics predicts the word-specific tone signatures of monosyllabic words in conversational Taiwan Mandarin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17337/) (2025)
- [Using embeddings to predict spoken word duration and pitch in Mandarin monosyllabic words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02002/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study investigates vowel-inherent spectral change (VISC) in spontaneous conversational Mandarin. Using the generalized additive model and word embeddings from distributional semantics, we show that, when controlling for variables such as vowel duration, gender, speaker identity, co-articulation, vowel identity, and utterance position, vowel formant trajectory dynamics have word-specific components that are tied to their meaning in context: The F1 and F2 trajectories of words can be predicted from their contextualized embeddings with an accuracy that substantially exceeds a permutation baseline. Challenging modular cognitive models of speech production, these results indicate that, words' semantics co-determine the fine details of their articulation.