A Study of the Vowel Context Effect on Initial Stops of Mandarin Produced by Native and Nonnative Speakers

Abstract

This study, based on corpus materials, investigates the “voice onset time” (VOT) of Mandarin word-initial stops in isolated syllables according to the effect of vowel contexts produced by native and nonnative speakers. Here, 1250 monosyllables of word-initial plosives /p/, /t/, /k/, /p[Formula: see text]/, /t[Formula: see text]/, and /k[Formula: see text]/ were uttered in combination with the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ in four tone contexts except /ki/ and /k[Formula: see text]i/ that are phonetically illegal in Mandarin by 20 participants (10 native Chinese speakers and 10 Urdu learners of Chinese). Results show that for native Chinese speakers, the VOTs of aspirated stops followed by the high vowels /i/ and /u/ are significantly longer than those followed by the low vowel /a/, and unaspirated stops followed only by the high back vowel /u/ are significantly longer than those followed by the low vowel /a/. For native Urdu speakers, the mean VOTs of word-initial stops in Mandarin monosyllables have no significant effect for both aspirated and unaspirated ones in combination with different vowels. Understanding the results of this study will be of assistance to second language learning and teaching.