The perceptual center in Mandarin Chinese syllables

Abstract

This study explores the location of the p-center in Mandarin Chinese and factors that influence it. Previous research has suggested that p-center behavior in languages that lack obstruent clusters, such as Cantonese and Mandarin, will differ from that found in Indo-European languages and others that are typologically different from Chinese languages. The purposes of the current paper are to investigate (1) whether Chinese languages systematically have a different p-center location from that found in previous studies of Indo-European languages, (2) whether vowel onglides are included as part of the syllable rime as claimed in the assumed analysis of Mandarin, and (3) how the alignment of the p-center is influenced by different features of the initial consonant, different features of rime, as well as the speech rates. Six native Mandarin speakers from Taiwan participated in a syllable repetition task with two different speech rates: 60 bpm and 120 bpm. The results indicate that the p-center in Mandarin Chinese is roughly aligned with the acoustic vowel onset, when the syllable does not have an onglide, and the onglide onset, when the syllable has an onglide. The initial consonant manner did not significantly influence onglide or vowel onsets, but the initial consonant acoustic duration, rimes, and speech rates all significantly influenced the vowel onsets as previous p-center studies have found. This appears to differ markedly from the p-center found in a recent study of Cantonese. Various causes for this mismatch are discussed.