1 Shifts in gestural timing as the basis for non-coronal fricative mergers in 2 Southwestern Mandarin: acoustic evidence from a dialect island 3 4 Dongmei Raoa,b, Jason A. Shawb,* 5 6 *Corresponding author:
[email protected], Tel: +1 47 5441 2015 7 a School of Literature and Journalism, Xihua University, Chengdu, 610075 Sichuan, China 8 b Department of Linguistics, Yale University, New Haven, 06511 Connecticut, USA 9 Abstract 10 Merger between a voiceless labiodental fricative, /f/, and a voiceless velar fricative, /x/, is 11 common across languages, including many dialects of Chinese, particularly varieties of 12 Southwest Mandarin. The sound changes that lead to merger in Southwest Mandarin dialects 13 are bidirectional: in some, /f/ becomes /x/; in others /x/ becomes /f/. We conducted a study of 14 phonetic variation in one such dialect, Zhongjiang Chinese, which has been reported to merge 15 /x/ to /f/ in the environment of /w/. Our results confirm this basic pattern while revealing 16 additional nuances, including a new environment for merger, /_oŋ/, and new phonetic details. 17 In particular, /f/ exhibits a wide range of spectral variation, including tokens with a low 18 frequency spectral peak, characteristic of a velar constriction. We interpret the pattern of 19 spectral variation for /f/ in the Zhongjiang dialect evidence for a secondary velar articulation, 20 /fˠ/. This result sheds new light on bidirectional sound change, as both directions of change, 21 /fˠ/→/xw/ and /xw/→/fˠ/, can be understood in terms of the same mechanism, shifts in the 22 relative timing of labial and dorsal gestural components of the fricatives.