Perceptual identification of high vowels in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

Taiwan Mandarin contrasts high vowels /i/, /y/, and /u/ in the aspects of tongue backness and lip roundedness. Despite that both /y/ and /u/ are associated with the [round] feature, the postural realizations of these two vowels are not always identical, though sometimes only very subtle. The current study investigates whether native speakers can reliably identify the three high vowels from natural speech when no acoustic signal was available. The results show that the highest identification accuracy was found in /i/, followed by /u/ and then /y/. The same order was also reported in the analyses of sensitivity. On the other hand, the two rounded vowels were easily confused, as revealed by the analysis of false alarm. The results also showed that participants may pay attention to different postural cues when distinguishing /u/ and /y/, along with a slight bias towards /y/. While it is rather challenging for native speakers to identify /u/ from /y/, our results did provide a selection of postural exemplars for each vowel, which may be considered as more canonical and subject to further analyses using image processing.