Geographical variation of the merging between dental and retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin

This study investigates the geographical distribution of pronunciation variation of voiceless dental and retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin. Previous studies indicated that the merging of the two sibilants is geographically dependent (Line, 1983; Chuang, 2009). However, the geographical effects in these studies are not easy to interpret due to the limited number of speakers and regions. For the current study, we recruited 331 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin from 120 regions in Taiwan. In a picture-naming task, 30 dental/retroflex-initial words were elicited from each speaker. The data were analysed with Generalized Additive Mixed models (Wood, 2004). The analysis revealed a robust effect of geographical location, with merging being less common in metropolitan cities as compared to the surrounding areas.