Abstract: A perceptual experiment was conducted in which stimuli sliced from 12 Beijing Mandarin syllahles spoken in isolation were identified by 10 native speakers of Beijing dialect. The results of the experiment indicate that when the pre-onset or post-offset of a tone is extended to a large extent, the initial voiced consonant, the medial, the nasal coda, and the vocalic ending are not related to the tonal pitch; even when the post-offset is extended to a short extent, the nasal coda and the vocalic ending are neither related to the tonal pitch. Thus, with regard to the tonal domain of Beijing Mandarin monosyllable in isolation, not only the initial voiced consonant and medial, but also the nasal coda and the vocalic ending are excluded; in other words,the basic contour of Beijing Mandarin tone in isolation is mainly related to the syllabic vowel and its adjacent transition.
Because F₀ in the pre-onset and post-onset are not related to the tonal pitch, there is no exact match between F₀ contour and tonal pitch.