Intrinsic consonantal F0 perturbation in 3-way VOT contrast and its implications for aspiration-conditioned tonal split: Evidence from Vietnamese

The nature of intrinsic consonantal F0 perturbations on tonal F0 in Vietnamese is investigated. Mean F0 and duration data for five unstopped tones of a female native speaker of Vietnamese, controlling for the effect of a three-way contrastive difference in VOT between alveolar stops, is presented. It is shown that [t], and [d] produce expected perturbations, but not [th], which evinces lower F0 at onset. The significance of this finding for differential tonal split conditioned by aspiration is discussed.