Spectral Analysis of Male and Female Vowels in Yongding Chinese

This paper presents the formant data on the three Yongding Hakka vowels [i a ]. Results of a spectral analysis show (i) F2 for the vowel [a] is larger for Yongding Hakka than other Chinese dialects, due probably to the ‘nudging effect’ of the mid centralization of the historical */u/; (ii) the Yongding Hakka // has the F-pattern of a schwa; and (iii) the F-pattern of the Yongding Hakka // is similar to that of the plain apical vowel [ ] in Beijing Mandarin, except for a larger F1 for //. Between the male and female F-values, (i) the scaling relation is non-uniform across vowels and formants; (ii) the female vowels exhibit larger between-category dispersion; (iii) the size of vowel space area in the F1F2 plane is larger for female than male vowels, suggesting larger betweenvowel category dispersion for female vowels; and (iv) the gender differences are reduced to a minimum after normalization.