Effects of focus and tone on vowel space in Chongming Chinese

Abstract

The formant frequencies of vowels are prone to change according to contexts, but the effects of focus on vowel space are rarely studied. This study attempts to investigate how focus and tone may influence the vowel space in Chongming Chinese with a production experiment. Chongming Chinese is a Chinese dialect with a complex tonal system. Twelve syllables with the vowel /æ/ were chosen and the syllables spread over eight lexical tones (two level tones, four contour tones, and two checked tones). The target syllables were embedded in carrier sentences with different preceding and following syllables. Four focus conditions were manipulated: broad focus, initial focus, medial focus, and final focus. During the experiment, twelve participants were elicited with precursor questions to produce sentences with different focus locations. The frequencies of the first two formats (F1 and F2) were extracted over the middle 50 ms of the vowel interval for each target syllable. Formant tracks were calculated with the Burg algorithm in Praat. F1 and F2 values under each focus condition and tone will be compared. It is hypothesized that F1 and F2 will be increased under focus because focus might make the vowels more open and front.