sound variation
phonetic variation of sounds in accented Mandarin
I am particularly interested in the sound variation of the lateral and retroflex fricative sounds in accented Mandarin, as native speakers of southern Chinese dialects may not produce these two sounds accurately in Mandarin. My research questions are as follows: (1) How would native dialectal background affect the phonetic variations of the two sounds in accented Mandarin? (2) What phonological factors may influence the phonetic realization of the sounds in accented Mandarin?
To determine the acoustic features of the two sounds among speakers of accented Mandarin, a set of acoustic measurements were extracted from the production of Mandarin words beginning with the two sounds and then submitted to random forest classification. The accuracy of classification can be used to measure the relative similarity of these two sounds between different pairs of dialectal regions. The computation of conditional feature importance can shed light on the relative impact of acoustic measurements and phonological factors in predicting the two sounds in accented Mandarin.
Related Publications
2023
- LVA variationist analysis of quoi in French native speech: A corpus-based study (accepted, co-first author)Linguistics Vanguard, 2023
2022
- ASAModeling retroflex fricative variation in accented mandarinIn The 183rd Meeting of Acoustical Society of America, 2022
2021
- ASAThe ongoing sound change between /l/ and /n/ in Gan Chinese: Random forest classificationIn The 181st Meeting of Acoustical Society of America, 2021
- ASAThe ongoing sound change between /l/ and /n/ in Gan Chinese: Random forest classificationIn The 181st Meeting of Acoustical Society of America, 2021
- NWAVA corpus study of the production of syllable-initial /l/ and /n/ in Gan-accented Mandarin: Random forest classificationIn The 49th Meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 2021
- ICSTLLThe emergence of /l/ in Chongyang Gan Chinese: OT learning with GLAIn The 54th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, 2021
- JLAOMerger of /l/ and /n/ in Chongyang Gan Chinese: OT analysis and GLAIn The 34th Paris Meeting on East Asian Linguistics, 2021