Pre-glottal vowels in Shanghai Chinese
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0017/000017Abstract
This study examines the acoustic realization of two complementary sets of vowels in Shanghai Chinese: One appearing in open syllables only (OSVs) and the other in closed syllables with a glottal coda (PGVs). Two factors - consonant onset and prominence level - were controlled to test the null hypothesis that PGVs are reduced realization of the OSVs due to their short duration. Results showed spectral reduc-tion of the PGVs but suggested that PGVs cannot be the reduced realization of OSVs as both onsetless and prominent PGVs failed to be consistently realized with a more expanded acoustic vowel space, which was predicted by the reduction account. We propose that the spectral reduction of the PGVs is an inherent feature of the vowel’s phonetic implementation.
References
Chen, Y. and Gussenhoven, C. Shanghai Chinese. Submitted.
Fourakis, M. 1991. Tempo, stress, and vowel reduction in American English. JASA 90: 1816-27.
Hillenbrand, J., and Clark, M. 2001. Effects of consonant environment on vowel formant patterns. JASA 109: 748 – 763.
Lindblom, B. 1963. Spectrographic study of vowel reduction. JASA 35: 1773-1781.
Moon, S. and Lindblom, B. 1994. Interaction between duration, context, and speaking style in English stressed vowels. JASA 1992: 40-55.
Peterson, G. E., & Barney, H.L. 1952. Control methods used in a study of the vowels. JASA 24: 175-184.
Stevens, K., & House, S. 1963. Perturbation of vowel articulations by consonantal context: An acoustical study. Journal of Speech Hearing Research 6: 111-127.
Traunmüller 1990. Analytical expressions for the tonotopic sensory scale. JASA 1990: 98-100.
van Bergem, D. 1995. Acoustic and lexical vowel reduction. Studies in Language and Language Use 16. IFOTT: Amsterdam.
Xu, B. and Tang, Z. (eds.) 1988. A description of the dialect of the Shanghai City. Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press.
Zee, E. and Maddieson, I. 1979. Tones and tonal sandhi in Shanghai: Phonetic evidence and phonological analysis. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 45: 93- 129.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2006 Yiya Chen (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
