A comparison study of information contributions of phonemic contrasts in Mandarin

Abstract

Phonemic contrasts are the basis of speech communication. Previous studies have indicated that different phonemic contrasts have different information contributions. The inherent relationships between phonemes in information transmission can interpret various phenomena in speech and provide guidance on some studies of linguistic such as diachronic linguistics. To well reveal the distribution structure of phonemes in Chinese, this paper used multidimensional scaling to comparatively analyze the information contributions of Initials and Finals (Chinese sub-syllabic units) in Mandarin. The contributions can be quantitatively measured by functional loads (FLs). The experimental results showed that: a) Initials at the same articulation place with different manners are more likely to have higher values of FLs, Initials with same manners at different place have lower values of FLs. b) Finals sharing same onset vowels and different main vowels tend to have higher values of FLs. c) For both Initials and Finals, the closer articulation places or tongue positions of onset vowels they have, the higher values of FLs they have.