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

  1. LV
    A variationist analysis of quoi in French native speech: A corpus-based study (accepted, co-first author)
    Delin Deng, and Fenqi Wang
    Linguistics Vanguard, 2023

2022

  1. ASA
    Modeling retroflex fricative variation in accented mandarin
    Fenqi Wang, Delin Deng, and Ratree Wayland
    In The 183rd Meeting of Acoustical Society of America, 2022
    HTML

2021

  1. ASA
    The ongoing sound change between /l/ and /n/ in Gan Chinese: Random forest classification
    Fenqi Wang, Delin Deng, and Ratree Wayland
    In The 181st Meeting of Acoustical Society of America, 2021
    HTML
  2. ASA
    The ongoing sound change between /l/ and /n/ in Gan Chinese: Random forest classification
    Fenqi Wang, Delin Deng, and Ratree Wayland
    In The 181st Meeting of Acoustical Society of America, 2021
    HTML
  3. NWAV
    A corpus study of the production of syllable-initial /l/ and /n/ in Gan-accented Mandarin: Random forest classification
    Fenqi Wang, Delin Deng, Qingcheng Zeng, Ratree Wayland, and Kevin Tang
    In The 49th Meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 2021
  4. ICSTLL
    The emergence of /l/ in Chongyang Gan Chinese: OT learning with GLA
    Fenqi Wang, and Shiyi Wang
    In The 54th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, 2021
  5. JLAO
    Merger of /l/ and /n/ in Chongyang Gan Chinese: OT analysis and GLA
    Fenqi Wang
    In The 34th Paris Meeting on East Asian Linguistics, 2021