Diphthongization and apicalization are two commonly detected phonetic and/or phonological processes for the development of high
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describes acoustics and articulation of fricative vowels in the Suzhou dialect of Wu Chinese. Acquiring frication initiates the
sound change. The production of fricative vowels in Suzhou is characterized by visible turbulent frication from the spectrograms,
and a significant lower Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio vis-à-vis the plain counterparts. The acoustic study suggests that spectral
characteristics of fricative vowels play a more important role in defining the vowel contrasts. The fricative high front vowels
have comparatively greater F1 and smaller F2 and F3 values than their plain counterparts, and in the acoustic F1/F2 plane, the
fricative vowels are located in an intermediate position between their plain and apical counterparts. The articulatory study
revealed that that not only tongue dorsum but also tongue blade are involved in the production of fricative high front vowels in
Suzhou. Phonologically, plain high front vowels, fricative high front vowels, and apical vowels distinguish in active place of
articulation, namely being anterodorsal, laminal, and apical respectively; and frication becomes a concomitant and redundant
feature in the production of fricative or apical vowels. It is concluded that the fine-grained phonetic details suggest that the
fricative high front vowels in Suzhou is at an intermediate stage of vowel apicalization in terms of both acoustics and
articulation.
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Faytak, Matthew
2022. Place uniformity and drift in the Suzhounese fricative and apical vowels. Linguistics Vanguard 8:s5 ► pp. 569 ff.
Zhang, Xinyi & Wen Liu
2022. 2022 13th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), ► pp. 399 ff.
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