Abstract
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.
Highlights
A large amount of literature has shown that human languages prefer speech sounds that are more distinct from one another (Martinet, 1952; Wang, 1968; Liljencrants & Lindblom, 1972; Lindblom, 1986, 1990; Flemming, 2002, 2004, 2005; Boersma & Hamann, 2008, among others) and that certain sound pairs form better contrasts than others
Given that the typological survey shows that in the [_i] context, the dental vs. palatal sibilants tend to be avoided even when there are no retroflex sibilants in the sound system, we focus on the perceptual distinctiveness of the dental and palatal sibilants in this study
The raw response time was transformed into Log Response Time (LogRT) and we analyzed the listeners’ ‘different’ responses to phonetically different pairs
Summary
A large amount of literature has shown that human languages prefer speech sounds that are more distinct from one another (Martinet, 1952; Wang, 1968; Liljencrants & Lindblom, 1972; Lindblom, 1986, 1990; Flemming, 2002, 2004, 2005; Boersma & Hamann, 2008, among others) and that certain sound pairs form better contrasts than others. For example, a system like /i a u/ is believed to be preferable in terms of the perceptual space (e.g., Boersma & Hamann, 2008, among others), and this is borne out in the cross-linguistic typology of vowel systems in that most languages have these three vowels The quality of the perceptual cues for a segment may differ depending on
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have