**Background**
1. Rising tones are more restricted both typologically and contextually (Maddieson, 1978).
2. In CVO and CVVO syllables (O = obstruents), if rising tones are allowed, falling and level tones are also allowed (Zhang, 2002).
3. Rising tones have a delayed f0 peak, which thus take more time to be fully realized (Xu, 1998).
4. Phonetically shorter contexts, such as CVO and CVVO, make the full realization of rising tones difficult.
5. Non-final syllables in a prosodic domain are also phonetically shorter (Lehiste, 1972), therefore a context that does not favor the full realization of rising tones.
6. Both right-dominant and left-dominant tone sandhi systems avoid non-final rising tones (and non-final contour tones in general) (Zhang, 2007).
7. Tone sandhi rules neutralizing rising tones in non-final contexts to a less articulatorily effortful tone are more productive (i.e., generalized on novel items more easily) (Zhang et al., 2011).
**Main Research Question**
Is the constraint on non-final rising tones (henceforth *NonFinalR) more learnable, if compared to other constraints banning tones arbitrarily?
**Method in a nutshell**
- Artificial grammar learning paradigm (auditory)
- Two conditions: *NonFinalR (phonetically grounded) vs. *NonFinalH (arbitrary)
- Both conditions are designed for *Retroflex (typologically common) to be learnable.
- Prediction: *NonFinalR and *Retroflex more learnable than *NonFinalH
**Selected References**
- Lehiste, I. (1972). The timing of utterances and linguistic boundaries. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 51(6), 2018–2024.
- Maddieson, I. (1978). Universals of tone. In J. H. Greenberg, C. A. Ferguson, & E. A. Moravcsik (Eds.), Universals of Human Language (pp. 337–356). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Moreton, E. (2008). Analytic bias and phonological typology. Phonology, 25(1), 83–127.
- Xu, Y. (1998). Consistency of tone-syllable alignment across different syllable structures and speaking rates. Phonetica, 55(4), 179–203.
- Zhang, J. (2002). The effects of duration and sonority on contour tone distribution. New York: Routledge.
- Zhang, J. (2007). A directional asymmetry in Chinese tone sandhi systems. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 16(4), 259–302.
- Zhang, J., Lai, Y., & Craig, S. (2011). Modeling Taiwanese speakers’ knowledge of tone sandhi in reduplication. Lingua, 121(2), 181–206.
