Contrastive Alveolar/Retroflex Phonemes in Singapore Mandarin Bilinguals: Comprehension Rates for Articulations in Different Accents, and Acoustic Analysis of Productions.

IF 1.1 2区 文学 Q3 AUDIOLOGY & SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY
Language and Speech Pub Date : 2024-12-01 Epub Date: 2023-11-10 DOI:10.1177/00238309231205012
Hannah L Goh, Fei Ting Woon, Scott R Moisik, Suzy J Styles
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The standard Beijing variety of Mandarin has a clear alveolar-retroflex contrast for phonemes featuring voiceless sibilant frication (i.e., /s/, /ʂ/, /ʈs/, /ʈʂ/, /ʈsʰ/, /ʈʂʰ/). However, some studies show that varieties in the 'outer circle', such in Taiwan, have a reduced contrast for these speech sounds via a process known as 'deretroflexion'. The variety of Mandarin spoken in Singapore is also considered as 'outer circle', as it exhibits influences from Min Nan varieties. We investigated how bilinguals of Singapore Mandarin and English perceive and produce speech tokens in minimal pairs differing only in the alveolar/retroflex place of articulation. In all, 50 participants took part in two tasks. In Task 1, participants performed a lexical identification task for minimal pairs differing only the alveolar/retroflex place of articulation, as spoken by native speakers of two varieties: Beijing Mandarin and Singapore Mandarin. No difference in comprehension of the words was observed between the two varieties indicating that both varieties contain sufficient acoustic information for discrimination. In Task 2, participants read aloud from the list of minimal pairs while their voices were recorded. Acoustic analysis revealed that the phonemes do indeed differ acoustically in terms of center of gravity of the frication and in an alternative measure: long-term averaged spectra. The magnitude of this difference appears to be smaller than previously reported differences for the Beijing variety. These findings show that although some deretroflexion is evident in the speech of bilinguals of the Singaporean variety of Mandarin, it does not translate to ambiguity in the speech signal.

新加坡普通话双语者的牙槽音/后弯音对比:不同重音发音的理解率和产生的声学分析。
标准的北京普通话变体具有明显的肺泡后屈对比,其音素以无声嘶擦音为特征(即/s/,/ʂ/,/\ 648; s/,/ʈsʰ/、/\648ʂ;/)。然而,一些研究表明,“外圈”的变体,如台湾的变体,通过一个被称为“去屈折”的过程,这些语音的对比度降低。新加坡普通话的变体也被认为是“外环”,因为它受到闽南语变体的影响。我们调查了新加坡普通话和英语的双语者如何感知和产生仅在牙槽/后弯发音位置不同的最小配对的语音标记。总共有50名参与者参加了两项任务。在任务1中,参与者对只有牙槽/后屈发音位置不同的最小配对进行了词汇识别任务,这是两种母语为北京普通话和新加坡普通话的人所说的。两个变体对单词的理解没有差异,这表明两个变体都包含足够的声学信息进行区分。在任务2中,参与者在录音的同时大声朗读最小配对的列表。声学分析表明,就摩擦的重心和另一种衡量标准:长期平均频谱而言,这些音位在声学上确实存在差异。这种差异的幅度似乎小于之前报道的北京品种的差异。这些发现表明,尽管新加坡普通话双语者的言语中存在明显的去屈折现象,但它不会转化为言语信号中的歧义。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Language and Speech
Language and Speech AUDIOLOGY & SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY-
CiteScore
4.00
自引率
5.60%
发文量
39
审稿时长
>12 weeks
期刊介绍: Language and Speech is a peer-reviewed journal which provides an international forum for communication among researchers in the disciplines that contribute to our understanding of the production, perception, processing, learning, use, and disorders of speech and language. The journal accepts reports of original research in all these areas.
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