On the fricative vowels in Suzhou Chinese

Abstract

Apical vowels are widely distributed in Chinese dialects, whereas fricative vowels or strident vowels are less known. This paper is an acoustic and articulatory study of fricative vowels in the Suzhou dialect of Wu Chinese. The acoustic data from 20 speakers show that the fricative vowels have formant patterns between their plain and apical counterparts. Linguographic data from four speakers reveal that more laminal part of the tongue is involved in the production of the fricative vowels than their plain counterparts, which are basically anterodorsal. And the EMA study from three speakers confirms a comparatively advanced lingual configuration in the production of the fricative vowels. Although the production of fricative vowels is characterized by visible turbulent frication from the spectrograms, and a significantly lower harmonics-to-noise ratio, the results suggest that spectral characteristics of fricative vowels and apical vowels play a more important role in defining the vowel contrasts. That is, plain high vowels, fricative high vowels, and apical vowels distinguish in place of articulation, namely, being anterodorsal, laminal, and apical, respectively. And frication could be treated as a concomitant and redundant feature in the production of fricative or apical vowels.