Variability in cross-dialectal production and perception of contrasting phonemes: the case of the alveolar-retroflex contrast in Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin

The alveolar-retroflex contrast is a critical feature in Mandarin and is often used to differentiate Beijing Mandarin from other dialects of Mandarin like Taiwan Mandarin. While a number of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors have been found to affect the alveolar-retroflex contrast, leading to variation in Taiwan Mandarin, a consistent alveolar-retroflex distinction is described for Beijing Mandarin in the literature on Mandarin phonology. With a series of map tasks, this dissertation examines whether the production of alveolar-retroflex contrast in both dialects is subject to the effects of vowel context and focal prominence. With a discrimination task and a goodness rating task, the categorical and gradient modes of alveolar-retroflex perception in different vowel contexts are investigated for listeners of both dialects. Results of the production study indicate that the acoustic characterization of Beijing vs. Taiwan Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast varies by vowel and by how each contrasting phoneme is realized in a particular vowel context. Focal prominence is found to result in longer syllable durations but not increased spectral distinctiveness between the alveolar and retroflex sibilants. The findings are discussed with respect to enhancement theory. The perception study found that Beijing and Taiwan listeners have different perceptual boundaries along the acoustic continuum, with a lower cutoff frication frequency required for the retroflex percepts for Beijing listeners. Listeners’ alveolar-retroflex boundaries shift to lower frequencies in the rounded vowel context to normalize for vowel coarticulatory effects. Discrepant within-category sensitivity was found in that while both Beijing and Taiwan listeners perceive all retroflex variants as equally good, Beijing listeners consider the endpoint variant of the alveolar as the best category exemplar. The findings are discussed within the frameworks of quantal theory and exemplar theory as well as with respect to the hyperspace effect in perception. Together, the results show that linguistic (i.e., vowel context) and sociolinguistic (i.e., dialect) factors collectively and variably affect the production and perception of the Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Chang, Yung-Hsiang

Contributors dc:contributor

• Shih, Chilin
• Allen, Jont B.
• Cole, Jennifer S.
• Hualde, José Ignacio
• Hamann, Silke

• production variation
• perception variation
• dialectal variation
• phonological contrasts
• Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast
• Beijing Mandarin
• Taiwan Mandarin
• map tasks
• vowel context effect
• prosodic strengthening
• categorical perception
• gradient perception

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2012 Yung-Hsiang Chang

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/42241

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/42241