Spectral moment analysis of affricates produced by Mandarin-speaking pre-adolescents with repaired cleft palate

Spectral features and perceptual judgment of place of affricate in Putonghua-speaking pre-adolescents with normal and cleft palate

“…Each syllable was manually extracted using PRAAT (version 5.3.16) [19] commencing from the onset of voicing (indicated by the lowest point of the intensity contour) to the end of the final or the vowel(s). The spectral moment features of those stimuli were determined by using the signal analysis software suite, TF32 [7,20]. A 20-millisecond Hamming window with pre-emphasis was positioned in the middle of each frication segment of the affricate [8,20,21,22].…”

“…Fewer distinctions in spectral moment features have been identified for Putonghua speakers [7]. For a group of ten typical Putonghua speakers aged from 9 to 13 years, the first moment (M1) was found to be significantly different between the retroflex and the alveolar affricates.…”

“…For a group of ten typical Putonghua speakers aged from 9 to 13 years, the first moment (M1) was found to be significantly different between the retroflex and the alveolar affricates. However, a direct comparison between Jiang et al's [7] and Jeng's [8] studies may not be appropriate due to the methodological differences in the designs. In Jeng's [8] study, both fricatives and affricates were included in the materials.…”