• VAT of the lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese

    分类: 语言学及应用语言学 >> 语言学及应用语言学 提交时间: 2019-06-20

    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.

  • Vocal Attack Time of different pitch levels and vowels in Mandarin

    分类: 语言学及应用语言学 >> 语言学及应用语言学 提交时间: 2019-06-20

    摘要: The purpose of this study was to investigate how vocal attack time (VAT) varies when young adults articulate the three vertex vowels in Mandarin Chinese at five linguistically unconstrained pitch levels. Sound pressure (SP) and electroglottographic (EGG) signals were recorded simultaneously from fifty-three male and fifty-three female subjects saying sustained /A/, /i/ and /u/ at five equally spaced pitch heights, each being higher than the preceding one. Then analyses of means, variance and correlation were performed to explore the relationships of VAT/pitch levels and VAT/vowels. Findings were: As mean STs (semitone) increase linearly from levels one to five, mean VATs decrease nonlinearly in a big group of subjects but increase nonlinearly in a small group of them. Based on the body-cover model of F0 control, data here lead to the guess that different people incline to use different strategies in increasing pitch height. When males, females and males plus females are considered as a whole, average STs and VATs tend to be positively correlated among the three vertex vowels.