This book consolidates and reconciles a number of competing theoretical models for the alignments of prenuclear glides in Mandarin, in light of evidence from slips-of-the tongue data and experimental acoustics. The book starts out with a general exploration of syllable theories and an overview of Mandarin syllable structures, focusing on longstanding problems and the aspects of phonological theories to which these problems are pertinent. The methodology for acoustic measurements, results of statistic analyses, and discussion of acoustic findings are then rendered, followed by two chapters on slips-of-the-tongue data. While none of the formal frameworks adequately accounts for our findings, a constraint-based theory offers better potential given the non-unitary structures it permits. This book thus also aims to demonstrate how psycholinguistic and acoustic findings can help resolve certain apparent conflicts among different approaches and how such findings can be incorporated in a psycholinguistic model of speech production planning. A substantial amount of the slips-of-the-tongue data is provided to help validate the findings as well as to facilitate further study by other researchers.


I-Ping Wan received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics and a Ph.D. certificate from the Center for Cognitive Science, at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York (SUNY-Buffalo), in 1 999. She then taught at National Dong Hua University for a year and has been teaching at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Chengchi University, since fall 2000. Her research areas include phonology, phonetics, psycholinguistics and cognitive science.