Standard Chinese (Beijing)

Lee, Wai-Sum; Zee, Eric

doi:10.1017/s0025100303001208

Cited by 148 publications

(69 citation statements)

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“…18,page 3 of 27 In Mandarin, the vowel [i] follows the palatal sibilants and most other consonants but not the dental and retroflex sibilants. As shown in (2), the dental and retroflex sibilants are followed by the homorganic syllabic approximants [ɹ̩ ] and [ɻ ̩ ] (Lee & Zee, 2003, Lee-Kim, 2014b, which are often referred to as the 'apical vowels. '…”

Section: Mandarin Sibilants and Apical Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implications for phonological contrasts

Li¹,

Zhang²

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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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.

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Section: Mandarin Sibilants and Apical Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The nature of these two sounds has been described in various ways, e.g., syllabic fricatives (Duanmu, 2007, p. 34), fricative vowels (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996, p. 314), and syllabic approximants (Lee & Zee, 2003;Lee-Kim, 2014b). apical vowel formation.…”

Section: Mandarin Sibilants and Apical Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implications for phonological contrasts

Li¹,

Zhang²

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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“…2.2 The "CV" segmentation (Lee and Zee 2003) Lee and Zee (2003) Although Lee and Zee always segmented at C-V and V-C boundaries, they kept diphthongs and triphthongs intact.…”

Section: The "Cgv" Segmentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They are rephrased in 7, where the onset is made of CG (the initial consonant and the medial glide, if any) and the rime is the rest of the syllable (VX, including tone). It can be seen that the riming conditions are hard to state in the CV analysis of phonemes (Lee and Zee 2003). Some examples are shown in 8.…”

Section: Riming Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

From non-uniqueness to the best solution in phonemic analysis: evidence from Chengdu Chinese

Duanmu

2017

lingua. sin.

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The "non-uniqueness" theory assumes that there is no best solution in phonemic analysis; rather, competing solutions can co-exist, each having its own advantages (Chao, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 4: 363-398, 1934). The theory is based on the assumption that there is no common set of criteria to evaluate alternative solutions. I argue instead that such a set of criteria can be established and it is possible to find the best solution. The criteria include riming properties, rime structure, constraints on syllable gaps, phonemic economy, phonetics, syllable sizes, and feature theory. I illustrate the proposal with Chengdu. Four analyses are compared, the "CGV" segmentation, the "CV" segmentation, the "finest" segmentation, and the "CVX" segmentation, and CVX is shown to be the best.

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“…French Bothorel, et al (1986) ] "saw" 1 It should be noted that the vowel often phonemically transcribed as =o= is realized in simple contexts as [G] [see Lee and Zee (2003)]. Two tokens of =o= were used in this study as part of the sets of vowels used to construct measurement grids for each speaker.…”

Section: Appendix: List Of Utterances With Vowels Analyzed In This Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

A study of high front vowels with articulatory data and acoustic simulations

Jackson¹,

McGowan²

2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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The purpose of this study is to test a methodology for describing the articulation of vowels. High front vowels are a test case because some theories suggest that high front vowels have little cross-linguistic variation. Acoustic studies appear to show counterexamples to these predictions, but purely acoustic studies are difficult to interpret because of the many-to-one relation between articulation and acoustics. In this study, vocal tract dimensions, including constriction degree and position, are measured from cinéradiographic and x-ray data on high front vowels from three different languages (North American English, French, and Mandarin Chinese). Statistical comparisons find several significant articulatory differences between North American English /i/ and Mandarin Chinese and French /i/. In particular, differences in constriction degree were found, but not constriction position. Articulatory synthesis is used to model the acoustic consequences of some of the significant articulatory differences, finding that the articulatory differences may have the acoustic consequences of making the latter languages’ /i/ perceptually sharper by shifting the frequencies of F2 and F3 upwards. In addition, the vowel /y/ has specific articulations that differ from those for /i/, including a wider tongue constriction, and substantially different acoustic sensitivity functions for F2 and F3.

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Standard Chinese (Beijing)

Abstract: The style of speech illustrated is that typical of the educated younger generation in Beijing. The recording is that of a 25-year-old female graduate student who has lived all her life in Beijing.

Cited by 148 publications

References 0 publications

Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implications for phonological contrasts

Perceptual distinctiveness between dental and palatal sibilants in different vowel contexts and its implications for phonological contrasts

From non-uniqueness to the best solution in phonemic analysis: evidence from Chengdu Chinese

A study of high front vowels with articulatory data and acoustic simulations

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