An Acoustic Analysis of Central Vowels in Malaysian Hokkien

This study describes and examines the acoustic properties of the central vowels [ɨ] and [ ] in Malaysian Hokkien (MH). The two central vowels are typologically special in that both of them are “full-fledged”, phonemic vowels in an inventory. Therefore our main research question is to see if the two central vowels are subject to contextual influences, just like their counterparts in other languages (e.g. [2, 6, 8, 9]). Our principal finding is that no significant contextual variability is attested, indicating that central vowels may be resistant to coarticulatory effects, even though they are unreduced. While [8]’s results showed substantial contextual variations of the phonemic vowel [ɨ] in Korean, which casts doubt on a duration-based account [6, 9], our results instead suggest that central vowels may not necessarily be targetless [2].