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
- 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