An Analysis of Sonorant Nasality in Beijing Mandarin

With the Nasometer, this paper studies the nasality contrast of liquid initials and the intrinsic nasality of seven cardinal vowels in Beijing Mandarin. The results show that the nasality contrast degree of initial consonants is high. The intrinsic nasality of vowels is closely related to the position of the tongue. The lower and more front the tongue is, the greater the degree of nasalization; the higher and more back the tongue is, the lower the degree of nasalization. The nasals and non-nasals have their own critical nasality values, where there is a gap between nasals from non-nasals, and the nasalized vowels distribute among the gap of the critical values.