An acoustic study of strident fricatives in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Mandarin has a distinction between flat and palatalized post-alveolar fricatives in addition to the alveolar–palatoalveolar contrast, which has been shown to have well-defined acoustic correlates. The goal of the study is to identify the acoustic cues to the place distinction in these strident fricatives and to evaluate how the acoustic properties map onto relevant phonetic features. Acoustic analyses were conducted of 216 fricative-vowel syllables produced by six speakers in three vowel and four tone contexts. Measures were taken of the properties of the frication noise and comparisons between fricative and vowel. The lower frequency limit of the frication noise, spectral peak location, spectral moments, spectral tilt, normalized amplitude, relative amplitude in specific frequency regions, and F2 onset frequency and movement in the adjacent vowel were examined. The results indicate the lower frequency limit of the frication noise is associated with distinct formant regions: F4 or F5 for the alveolar, F3 for the palatalized post-alveolar, and F4 for the flat post-alveolar fricative. Measures that successfully classified all three fricatives include spectral peak location, spectral mean, variance and skewness, amplitude difference between fricative and vowel in the F3 and F4 region, and F2 frequency at vowel onset. [Work supported by NIH.]