An Acoustic Study on Voiceless Retroflex and Dental Sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin Spontaneous Speech
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Chuang, Yu-Ying
Abstract
The present study investigated the realizations of voiceless retroflex and dental sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin. Past studies on this issue are mainly of two tracks – sociolinguistic studies on spontaneous speech and acoustic studies on experimental data. In this study we would like to examine sibilant realizations in spontaneous speech from the acoustic perspective. Fifteen speakers of both genders from two regions, Taipei and Kaohsiung, were recruited and each speaker contributed 30-minute-long speech data. All retroflex and dental sibilant tokens were labeled, and the centroid frequency of each sibilant was measured to determine its realization. Effects of four factors were looked into, including two social factors, region and gender, and two linguistic factors, prosodic prominence and word class. Results showed that both region and gender played determinant roles. Females generally made larger sibilant contrasts than males, but inconsistency was observed for cross-regional comparisons. While Taipei females distinguished sibilants better than Kaohsiung females, the opposite was observed for male speakers. As for the effects of linguistic factors, it was also found that sibilant realizations in Taiwan Mandarin were indeed subject to both prosodic prominence and word class. In particular, the strengthening effect was shown in linguistically prominent conditions – prosodically prominent and content word conditions, in which speakers tended to make greater sibilant distinctions. Our results further implicated distinctive functions for the processes of retroflexion and dentalization in Taiwan Mandarin. Retroflexion characterized speaker group discrepancies, while dentalization reflected different levels of linguistic prominence. In this regard, degrees of retroflexion were sensitive to extra-linguistic differences, whereas degrees of dentalization were sensitive to language-internal categorization.
Subjects
retroflex sibilant
dental sibilant
prosodic prominence
word class
spontaneous speech
Taiwan Mandarin
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-98-R95142001-1.pdf
Size
23.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):a6fde6f1959a69b4631237df0b746568