The functional load of tone in Mandarin is as high as that of vowels

Abstract

Tonal languages, such as Mandarin, convey information using both phonemes and tones.Using a recently proposed framework for measuring the functional load of a phonological contrast (i.e.how much use a language makes of the contrast), we carry out several computations to estimate how much use Mandarin makes of tones.The most interesting result is that identifying the tone of a syllable is at least as important as identifying the vowels in the syllable.Another computation suggests that the contrast between low and neutral tone carries relatively little information.