Tone sandhi is extensive in Taiwanese, where all but the final syllable in a morphosyntactically defined unit undergo sandhi. Previous studies have primarily focused on comparing sandhi tonal realizations to their corresponding citation ones to determine whether neutralization occurs. However, such a high-level comparison overlooks the variability in how tones are actually realized. This study aims to examine tonal variation in Taiwanese, focusing on whether word meaning influences tonal realization. Using spontaneous speech data, we analyzed the realizations of the high-falling tone. Our findings indicate that word meaning does contribute to tonal variability. Moreover, when meaning-induced tonal variation is accounted for, no remaining differences between sandhi and citation tones can be observed. These results suggest that tonal realizations systematically vary with word meaning and that the effect of meaning on tonal realizations should be considered when discussing neutralization.