Frequency Analysis of the Vowels in Cantonese from 50 Male and 50 Female Speakers

The purpose of the study is to obtain measurements of the formant frequencies of the 7 long vowels [i... y... E... {... a... O... u...] in the (C)V: syllables and 7 half-long vowels [i y E { a O u] in the (C)V:S syllables, and 4 short vowels [I å ∏ U] in the (C)VS syllables in Cantonese. Results show that (1) in the F1/F2 plane the half-long vowels except [a] are centralized relative to the long vowels; (2) the center Fvalues for [I å U] are similar to those for [E... a... O...], similar to what is reported in Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996); (3) both (1) and (2) are true for the male and female speakers; and (4) for both the long and half-long vowels, the distance between the mid vowels and the high vowels in the F1/F2 plane is larger than the distance between the mid vowels and the low vowel [a] for the female speakers, but for the male speakers the distances are similar.