An Acoustic and Articulatory Analysis of Vowels in Ningbo Chinese

This paper examines the acoustic and articulatory aspects of vowel production in Ningbo Chinese. Frequency results show that ten normal-length vowels can be well distinguished by four levels of vowel height and two levels of vowel backness in an acoustic F1/F2 plane. Acquired EMA data show that there is no clear correlation between vowel height and articulatory parameters. Results from a PARAFAC modeling of measured tongue articulators show that the complicated tongue shape data can be successfully decomposed into two underlying lingual movement mechanisms, namely the “front raising” and the “retraction and back raising”. And both vowel height and vowel backness can be well interpreted in terms of these two underlying tongue movement mechanisms.