Revisiting Mandarin ‘apical vowels’: An articulatory and acoustic study

Lee-Kim, Sang-Im

doi:10.1017/s0025100314000267

Cited by 46 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…2 The acoustic analysis in Lee-Kim (2014b) showed that, in producing Mandarin [sɹ̩ ], [ɕi], and [ȿɻ ̩ ], the tongue positions do not change significantly after the tongue reaches the consonantal targets, which confirms that the consonantal and the vocalic gestures are homorganic. That is, the apical vowels are the 'vocalized prolongation' of their preceding consonants (Chao, 1934, p. 374 (Zee & Lee, 2001;Lee & Li, 2003;Cheung, 2004;Zee & Lee 2004) …”

Section: Mandarin Sibilants and Apical Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…18,page 3 of 27 In Mandarin, the vowel [i] follows the palatal sibilants and most other consonants but not the dental and retroflex sibilants. As shown in (2), the dental and retroflex sibilants are followed by the homorganic syllabic approximants [ɹ̩ ] and [ɻ ̩ ] (Lee & Zee, 2003, Lee-Kim, 2014b, which are often referred to as the 'apical vowels. '…”

Section: Mandarin Sibilants and Apical Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The nature of these two sounds has been described in various ways, e.g., syllabic fricatives (Duanmu, 2007, p. 34), fricative vowels (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996, p. 314), and syllabic approximants (Lee & Zee, 2003;Lee-Kim, 2014b). apical vowel formation.…”

Section: Mandarin Sibilants and Apical Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implications for phonological contrasts

Li¹,

Zhang²

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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Mandarin Chinese has dental, palatal, and retroflex sibilants, but their contrasts before [_i] are avoided: The palatals appear before [i] while the dentals and retroflexes appear before homorganic syllabic approximants (a.k.a. apical vowels). An enhancement view regards the apical vowels as a way to avoid the weak contrast /si-ɕi-ȿi/. We focus on the dental vs. palatal contrast in this study and test the enhancement-based hypothesis that the dental and palatal sibilants are perceptually less distinct in the [_i] context than in other vowel contexts. This hypothesis is supported by a typological survey of 155 Chinese dialects, which showed that contrastive [si, tsi, tsʰi] and [ɕi, tɕi, tɕʰi] tend to be avoided even when there are no retroflexes in the sound system. We also conducted a speeded-AX discrimination experiment with 20 English listeners and 10 Chinese listeners to examine the effect of vowels ([_i] , [_a], [_ou]) on the perceived distinctiveness of sibilant contrasts ([s-ɕ], [ts-tɕ], [tsʰ-tɕʰ]). The results showed that the [_i] context introduced a longer response time, thus reduced distinctiveness, than other vowels, confirming our hypothesis. Moreover, the general lack of difference between the two groups of listeners indicates that the vowel effect is language-independent.

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Section: Mandarin Sibilants and Apical Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mandarin Sibilants and Apical Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implications for phonological contrasts

Li¹,

Zhang²

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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“…Third, frication lasts for the entire duration of the vowel, which is not the case in e.g. Standard Chinese [9]. We will also show that the three different processes are in different developmental stages.…”

Section: Consonant-vowel Coarticulationmentioning

confidence: 63%

Register, tone, and consonant-vowel coarticulation

Sloos¹,

Ran²

2018

Speech Prosody 2018

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Although partial coarticulation of consonants and vowels is common, coarticulation in which consonantal features are realized for the complete duration of the vowel are rarely reported (except for vowel nasalization). Such extreme consonant-vowel coarticulation may occur if a fricative or affricate is followed by a vowel with the same voicing and place of articulation, causing frication during the entirety of the vowel. This paper illustrates and discusses fricative-vowel coarticulation in Huangyan Taizhou, a Wu Chinese dialect, where this only occurs in the low tonal register. Consonant-vowel coarticulation in general appears to be a remarkably strong tendency of Huangyan Taizhou (HT). First, fricative-vowel coarticulation involves a larger number of vowels and consonants than reported for other languages in which fricative vowels occur, viz. three different consonants and three vowels. Second, HT also has two other processes of extreme coarticulation of consonants and vowels. The first is a historical process in which a nasal and the following vowel were coarticulated and eventually merged, resulting in syllabic nasals with a tonal specification. Like fricative-vowel coarticulation, these syllabic nasals only occur in the low register. A more common process of extensive coarticulation also occurs in HT, namely, vowel nasalization, which is unrelated to tone and register. In this paper, we present these different forms of extreme coarticulation in HT, discuss their possible underlying mechanisms and why they are related to register.

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“…They used Chinese phonetic symbols [ɿ] and [ʅ] for the Mandarin high front apical vowel and high back apical vowel. The present study substituted [ɿ] and [ʅ] with the IPA equivalents [ɹ̪ ] and [ɻ] proposed byLee-Kim (2014). available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.…”

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confidence: 99%

Acoustic development of vowel production in native Mandarin-speaking children

Yang¹,

Fox²

2017

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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The present study aims to document the developmental profile of static and dynamic acoustic features of vowel productions in monolingual Mandarin-speaking children aged between three and six years in comparison to adults. Twenty-nine monolingual Mandarin children and 12 native Mandarin adults were recorded producing ten Mandarin disyllabic words containing five monophthongal vowel phonemes /a i u y ɤ/. F1 and F2 values were measured at five equidistant temporal locations (the 20–35–50–65–80% points of the vowel's duration) and normalized. Scatter plots showed clear separations between vowel categories although the size of individual vowel categories exhibited a decreasing trend as the age increased. This indicates that speakers as young as three years old could separate these five Mandarin vowels in the acoustic space but they were still refining the acoustic properties of their vowel production as they matured. Although the tested vowels were monophthongs, they were still characterized by distinctive formant movement patterns. Mandarin children generally demonstrated formant movement patterns comparable to those of adult speakers. However, children still showed positional variation and differed from adults in the magnitudes of spectral change for certain vowels. This indicates that vowel development is a long-term process which extends beyond three years of age.

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Revisiting Mandarin ‘apical vowels’: An articulatory and acoustic study

Cited by 46 publications

References 23 publications

Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implications for phonological contrasts

Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implications for phonological contrasts

Register, tone, and consonant-vowel coarticulation

Acoustic development of vowel production in native Mandarin-speaking children

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