Posterior tone sandhi in Southern Min has often been considered a type of neutral tone due to phonetic weakening. However, the author argues that it is inappropriate to define neutral tones in Chinese based on phonetic weakening. Instead, this paper adopts “tonal neutralization” as the criterion and investigates whether posterior tone sandhi in Jieyang Southern Min qualifies as a neutral tone. The author concludes that the tone sandhi can be classified as a neutral tone, as partial neutralization is supported by the results of both introspective analysis and acoustic-phonetic experiment.

Although many studies were conducted on Japanese language teachers’ beliefs on speech education and their teaching practices, there is not enough research regarding overseas, and the lack of a common framework makes it difficult to compare their findings. Therefore, based on the BEO model, I designed a questionnaire with 18 questions regarding teachers’ beliefs, experiences, and opinions, and conducted a survey of 100 Japanese language teachers working at 37 universities across China. In this paper, I present the survey results and discuss the conflicts they face in practicing pronunciation instruction, the selection of phonetic items to be taught, and their perceptions of the role of non-native speaker teachers in pronunciation instruction.

This paper examines the accent of compound nouns in Kada no Azumamaro’s accent materials. The tone preservation rule does not hold; most of the compound nouns show a high-beginning pattern. Four-mora compound nouns with two-mora nouns from classes 1, 3, and 4 as their second elements largely follow Wada Minoru’s compound accent law. The accent of compound nouns with deverbal nouns as their second element depends on their semantic case relation. Compound nouns with a 2+3 mora structure most frequently show an H2 (-4) pattern, followed by an H4 (-2) pattern.