sound variation

investigate phonetic variation of sounds in accented Mandarin

I am particularly interested in exploring the sound variation of the lateral and retroflex fricative sounds in accented Mandarin, as these sounds may not be produced accurately by native speakers of southern Chinese dialects when speaking Mandarin. My research investigates two main questions: (1) How does native dialectal background influence the phonetic variations of these two sounds in accented Mandarin? (2) What phonological factors may affect the phonetic realization of these sounds in accented Mandarin?

To examine the acoustic features of these two sounds among speakers of accented Mandarin, acoustic measurements were extracted from the production of Mandarin words that begin with these sounds. These measurements were then analyzed using random forest classification. The classification accuracy provides a metric for assessing the relative similarity of these two sounds across different dialectal regions. Furthermore, the computation of conditional feature importance helps illuminate the relative impact of acoustic measurements and phonological factors in predicting the pronunciation of these sounds in accented Mandarin.

More findings from this research will be available soon. Please stay tuned for updates.

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