Structured variation in Suzhou Chinese fricative consonants and vowels

Abstract

Uniform phonetic implementation of phonological primitives has been suggested to be a low-level constraint on speech production. Suzhou Chinese offers an example of how this constraint may shape the development of systems of phonological contrast: a pair of recently innovated “fricative vowels,” rounded and unrounded, have come to be produced with the addition of noticeable fricative noise. This noise is spectrally similar to that of a fricative consonant, most frequently alveolopalatal /ɕ/ but occasionally /s/, suggesting that speakers have begun to refer to shared acoustic targets for these phonotactically dissimilar sounds. In order to assess the degree of acoustic similarity among these segments, we compare the fricative noise in the unrounded and rounded fricative vowels of 43 speakers of Suzhou Chinese with the fricative noise of each speaker’s onset fricative consonants /ɕ/ and /s/. Spectral parameters analyzed are chosen to reflect constriction anteriority in strident fricatives. Correlations in these parameters as implemented across consonantal onsets such as /ɕ/ and /s/, and the unrounded fricative vowel and the rounded fricatie vowel are examined.