A key to understand the VMS

[ReneZ]

Many thanks for the effort!

I don't think that the conclusion can be drawn just yet.

The figure is defined by edit distance, and the edit distance of course depends fully on orthography.

For this Chinese text, upper case and lower case have been kept seperate, and as a result the very frequent
word 'wo3' ends up in two spots at almost opposite points in the figure.

The intonation can be represented in different ways. Here, it is done with diacritics over the vowel, which is of course a valid option, but I wonder (from a closer look at the figure) if it was consistent.

Also, this graph considers composite words (two syllables) while the structure in Mandarin occurs at the level
of syllables.

The problem with these types of experiments is exactly the large number of permutations that one could try.