摘要:
The
purpose of this research was to investigate the association of vocal
attack time (VAT) and tones in speakers of Mandarin Chinese, and to explore how
tones initiated at different pitch levels affected VAT. SP and EGG signals were
synchronously re corded from 72 young undergraduates or postgraduates (42 females
and 30 males) while they were reading aloud a wordlist of 50 disyllabic words at
their most comfortable pitch, loudness and rate. VAT measures revealed three
findings . (1) Vocal attack time s hows no significant difference between the common
yangping and the yangping derived from shangsheng . This, from a physiological
perspective, supports the argument that the tone sequence 3 3 in Mandarin is indeed
converted into 2 3, nothing else. (2) The to nes of Mandarin Chinese that start from
low pitch levels (35, 21) tend to present significantly different VAT values from
those that start from high pitch levels (55, 51), with mean VATs of the former being
much longer than those of the latter. This embodi es the nonlinear contra variant
relationship between VAT and F0 at vowel onsets. (3) There are deviations or
individual differences: a small number of people do not follow this pattern.