On the Status of the Prenucleus Glide in Mandarin Chinese

Prenucleus glides are traditionally classified as belonging to Final in Chinese syllables. More recently, there have been suggestions that prenucleus glides are part of Initial (Duanmu 1990, Bao 1990), and that they are part of Initial or Final depending on the places of articulation of the preceding consonants (Wan 1997). In this study, we tried to resolve the problem by administering two experiments. In the first experiment, the subjects were asked to fuse two syllables into one. In the second experiment, the subjects were asked to decide on a preferred way a syllable should be split, with two alternatives being provided for the subjects to choose from. The results showed that in both tasks the subjects preferred to classify glide with Rime. Thus, the results of our study generally concurred with the traditional treatment of classifying the prenucleus glide as part of the Final.