An Acoustic Exploration of Whether Alveolar Onsets [ts, tsh, s] Are Palatalized in Zhuolan Raoping Hakka
Author: Ming-Chung Cheng (Institute of Hakka Language and Communication, National United University)
Vol.&No.：Vol. 61, No. 1
Date：March 2016
Pages：1-31
DOI：10.6210/JNTNULL.2016.61(1).01
Abstract：
This study explored whether [ts, tsh, s] are acoustically palatalized into [tɕ, tɕh,ɕ] in Zhouolan Raoping Hakka. Thirty-six native speakers of Zhuolan Raoping Hakka participated in this study. They were evenly divided into six groups according to sex (male and female) and age (old, middleaged, young) and were asked to read the author’s self-designed wordlist. Speech tokens of [s, ɕ] were collected according to vowel context, sex, and age. PRAAT, a computer software for acoustic analysis, was manually used to measure the friction duration and spectral peak frequencies of fricatives [s, ɕ] in Zhuolan Raoping Hakka and Mandarin Chinese. The results indicated that [s] before [i] or [-i-] is palatalized to [ɕ] and is related to neither sex nor age factors. Moreover, this study also compared the different phonetic behaviors of [ts, tsh, s] before [i] in Zhuolan Raoping Hakka and Dongshi Dapu Hakka, and proposed that [tʃ, tʃh, ʃ] generated a “blocking effect” on palatalization from [ts, tsh, s] to [tɕ, tɕh, ɕ].
Keywords：alveolar, Zhuolan, Hakka, palatalization, Raoping
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