Acoustic features of Mandarin monophthongs by Tibetan speakers

Abstract

The present study, under the framework of Lado's Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (1957) and Flege's Speech Learning Model (1995), is to find out whether and to what extent the Tibetan vowel space of native Tibetan speakers affects the “working” vowel space of Mandarin Chinese. The experiment adopts the experimental phonetic approach to examine the features of vowel space of 10 Tibetan speakers (5 male and 5 female) when they read monosyllabic words in Tibetan and Standard Chinese. When compared with the vowel space of Chinese speakers, the vowel space of Tibetan speakers presents the following features: 1. The overall distribution of the vowel space of Tibetan speakers is higher than that of Chinese speakers because the vowels produced by Tibetan speakers have lower Fl. 2. Under the influence of Tibetan vowel system, Tibetan speakers' vowel space of Mandarin monophthongs is slightly to the right of Chinese speakers' vowel space. 3. With the calculation of the Euclidean Distance between Tibetan speakers' monophthongs and Chinese speakers' monophthongs, the production of Mandarin monophthongs by Tibetan male speakers cannot be explained by Flege's Speech Learning Model, while the production of Mandarin monophthongs by Tibetan female speakers provides more evidence to the justification of Speech Learning Model.