Mandarin tone contours, measured
Of the syllables in 624 publicly available recordings of Mandarin words spoken by 20 people, 20.7% of the 58 third-tone syllables that could be graded carry the fall-and-rise the tone diagram draws for them.
How often does the Mandarin third tone dip? reads the measurement. This page is the dataset itself.
What is here
- DATASET.json — The dataset itself: one row per nucleus, plus one per recording and 624 credits.
- DATASET.csv — The same nuclei as a flat table.
- LEDGER.jsonl — Every number the article states, with the file and the path inside it that the number is read from.
- PREREGISTRATION.md — What was written down before the first file was opened, with every later change appended and dated.
- RUN-METADATA.json — The run, the instrument, the cost and the limits.
- evidence/ — the intermediate files every ledger row selects into, at the paths the ledger names, so each of the article's numbers can be re-resolved from what is published here.
How to cite
Zavada, J. (2026). How often do Mandarin tones carry the shape the notation gives them? A measurement of 624 public recordings. Tingyin. https://www.tingyin.app/studies/mandarin-tone-contours/DATASET.json
Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0. The recordings belong to their speakers and to Lingua Libre and AISHELL-3; no audio is redistributed. The derived data carries the ShareAlike term of the source recordings, which is why this dataset is CC BY-SA 4.0 and not CC0.