Zooming-in on Oujiang Wu: tonal homogeneity and acoustic reconstruction in a small sub-group of Chinese dialects

The long and the short of Wencheng tones – acoustic and auditory description of tonologically challenging phenomena in an Oujiang Wu dialect of Chinese

Auditory and acoustic data are presented to document some tonologically challenging aspects of the seven tones of Wénchéng, a south-west Oujiang Wu dialect of Chinese. Tones are described both in isolation form and in selected lexical tone sandhi combinations. It is shown how the complexity of the tonal system results in clashes between tonological representation and phonetic reality.

Phonetic Explanation for Initial and Tonal Evolution in Wu Dialects of Chinese

This study tries to explore phonetic mechanism of the evolution both for initials and tones taken place in Wu Dialects of Chinese, so that to find out why the developments of the two aspects are always tangled one another. The preliminary perspectives drawn here are based on a brief survey to some relevant investigations. Both acoustic and physiological evidences gathered so far lead to a sugge...

Oujiang Wu Tones and Acoustic Reconstruction

Numerical study on the acoustic field of a centrifugal fan and the tonal noise sources

The widespread use of squirrel cage fans, especially in ventilation and home and industrial environments, has led to the formation of many research efforts to improve performance and reduce the sound produced by this type of fan. In the literature, the most important factor in generating sound in this category of fans is the confrontation between the rotor exit flow and the volute of the fan. I...

Sub-syllabic Acoustic Modeling across Chinese Dialects

This paper presents a series of experiments on sub-syllabic unit selection across the two Chinese dialects – Mandarin and Cantonese. Evaluations are based on syllable recognition using only acoustic information, and no lexical knowledge is incorporated. We use a variety of subsyllabic acoustic models, motivated by phonological and lingustic structures charactersitics of Chinese. Our results sho...