Mandarin lexical tone duration: Impact of speech style, word length, syllable position and prosodic position

•This study aims to establish a link between speech technology and linguistic research by studying the durations of Mandarin lexical tones in large speech corpora using tools from automatic speech recognition.•About 1000 hours of continuous Mandarin were used in this study. To our knowledge, this is the first time ever that linguistic study of Mandarin tones has been carried out on such a large corpus.•To date, only a few research studies were found on the regional variation of standard Mandarin, let alone any large corpus-based study of the subject.