SPECTRAL MEASURES FOR SIBILANT FRICATIVES OF ENGLISH, JAPANESE, AND MANDARIN CHINESE Fangfang Li a, Jan Edwards b, & Mary Beckman a aDepartment of Linguistics, OSU & bDepartment of Communicative Disorders, UW {cathy|mbeckman}@ling.ohio-state.edu,
[email protected] ABSTRACT English /s/ and / Ѐ/ can be differentiated by the Most acoustic studies of sibilant fricatives focus on spectral properties of the frication itself [1, 8]. As languages that have a place distinction like the mentioned earlier, English /s/ and / Ѐ/ contrast in English distinction between coronal alveolar /s/ place, with the narrowest lingual constriction being and coronal post-alveolar / Ѐ/. Much less attention made more backward in the oral cavity for / Ѐ/ than has been paid to languages such as Japanese, for /s/. The longer front cavity in producing / Ѐ/ where the contrast involves tongue posture as lowers the overall frequency for the major energy much as position. That is, the Japanese sibilant that concentration in the fricative spectrum. The length an alveolopalatal fricative difference is further enhanced by lip protrusion in ,/נ / contrasts with /s/ is that has a “palatalized” tongue shape (a bunched /Ѐ/, so that it has been consistently observed that predorsum). This paper describes measures that there is more low-frequency energy for the / Ѐ/ can be calculated from the fricative interval alone, spectrum and more high-frequency energy for /s/ which we applied both to the place distinction of [8, 16]. English and the “palatalization” or posture This generalization about a difference in energy distinction of Japanese. The measures were further tested on Mandarin Chinese, a language that has a distribution between /s/ and / Ѐ/ can be captured three-way contrast in sibilant fricatives contrasting effectively by the centroid frequency, the first in both tongue position and posture.