In Chinese languages, when two syllables merge into one that has the segments from both, the segments compete to survive in the limited time slots (Chung, 1996, 1997; Lin, 2007). The survival or deletion of segment(s) follows a series of rules, including the Edge-In Effect (Yip, 1988) and vowel selection (R.-F. Chung, 1996, 1997; Hsu, 2003), which decide on the outer edge segments and vowel nucleus, respectively. This dissertation is dedicated to investigating the phonological patterns and phonetic details of syllable contraction in Rugao, a dialect of Jianghuai Mandarin, with more focus on the vowel selection and deletion process. First, I explored the segment selecting mechanism, including the preservation or deletion of the consonantal and vocalic segments, respectively. Based on the phonological analyses, I further investigated two major questions: 1) what determines the winner of the two vowel candidates for the limited nucleus slot in the fully contracted syllable, the linearity of the vowels (R.-F. Chung, 1996, 1997) or the sonority of the vowels (Hsu, 2003), and 2) is a fully contracted syllable phonetically and/or phonologically neutralized to a non-contracted lexical syllable with seemingly identical segments with regards to syllable constituents, lengths, and vowel quality?The corpus data suggest that, 1) the Edge-In Effect (Yip, 1988) is prevalent in Rugao syllable contraction in deciding the survival of the leftmost and rightmost segments in the pre-contraction form whether they are vocalic or not, unless the phonotactics of the language overwrite it. 2) In fully contracted syllables, the winner of the two vowel candidates is contingent upon the sonority of the vowels as well as the phonotactics of the language. Following such patterns, a forced choice experiment focused on the selection of the vowel nucleus that controlled the syllable structure and used nonce words confirmed the influence of sonority in the vowel competition and ruled out the factor of relative linear order of the vowels. Generally, the vowel of higher sonority is more likely to survive than the competitor of lower sonority ranking, assuming a vowel sonority hierarchy based on height and centrality. The surviving vowels in the contracted syllable were then further examined with production experiments and acoustic measurements. The results suggest that the deletion of the losing vowel is in fact incomplete, and manifested in two ways, 1) the contracted vowel is longer than the lexical vowel in general, although the ratio of vowel in the duration of the syllable may or may not be different, 2) the contracted vowel has different F1 and/or F2 values than its lexical counterpart, suggesting the vowel quality has altered in the contracted syllable. The phonologically defined process is shown to be phonetically quite complex, suggesting that the lexical distinction is maintained in some ways even though the two words seem neutralized.
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