Co-articulation between Consonant and Vowel in Cantonese and Taiwanese CVC Syllables Wai-Sum Lee 1 , Yueh-chin Chang 2 , Feng-fan Hsieh 2 1 Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 2 Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan w.s.lee@cityu.edu.hk, ycchang@mx.nthu.edu.tw, ffhsieh@mx.nthu.edu.tw Abstract The present study investigates the C-V and V-C co- articulations in Cantonese and Taiwanese CVC monosyllables, where C = plosives [p t k] and V = vowels [i a u]. EMA AG500 and NDI Wave were used to record the articulatory actions of the tongue during the test syllables uttered by four male speakers, two Cantonese and two Taiwanese. Results show that the between-segment co-articulation strength (CS), which is indicated in the Euclidean distance of the tongue positions at the C-V and V-C transitions, varies with the plosive type, vowel type, and position of the plosive in the syllables. For both Cantonese and Taiwanese, the general order of decreasing CS is (i) when C = [p] > C = [k] > C = [t] and (ii) when V = [i] > V = [u] > V = [a]. A major difference between the two languages is a stronger CS between V and -C than between C- and V in Cantonese, but a stronger CS between C- and V than between V and -C in Taiwanese. The articulatory data reveal that despite the similarity in syllable structure between Cantonese and Taiwanese, the latent articulatory relationship between consonant and vowel in a syllable differ between the two languages. Index Terms: C-V and V-C co-articulations, co-articulation strength, Euclidean distance, Cantonese, Taiwanese 1. Introduction Over the past several decades, there have been studies of consonant and vowel co-articulation in syllable production, through analysis of formant frequencies and/or articulator movements at the consonant-vowel transition (e.g., [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]). Attention has been paid to ‘co- articulatory resistance’ (CR) in the sound segments of different types ([1, 2, 6, 7, 8]). According to [7], CR is the extent to which a sound segment resists or blocks the co- articulation influence from an adjacent sound segment. The data on C-V co-articulation reported in the previous studies show that the coronal consonants, such as dental, alveolar, postalveolar, and alveolo-palatal, have a large CR, due to incompatibility between the tongue gestures for the coronal consonants and the neighboring vowels, whereas the labial consonants, which do not interfere with the tongue gestures for the neighboring vowels, have a small CR. The CR of the velar consonants varies in different vowel contexts and tends to be small when the velars adjacent to a palatal vowel. A large or small CR may be interpreted as a weak or strong ‘co- articulation strength’ (CS) between the neighboring sound segments. The present study investigates the CS between the consonant and vowel in CVC syllables in Cantonese and Taiwanese. In the two languages, the plosives [p t k] can occur in the syllable-initial or syllable-final position. The purpose of study is to determine (i) the CS between the syllable- initial/syllable-final plosives [p t k] and the neighboring vowels [i a u] in Cantonese and Taiwanese CVC syllables based on the Euclidean distance between the positions of the tongue points during the vowels, (ii) the variations in CS with respect to different places of articulation for the plosives and the tongue gestures of the neighboring vowels in the syllables, and (iii) the similarities and differences in CS between C-V and V-C co-articulations within each language and between the two languages. 2. Method 2.1. Speakers Four male speakers who were university students in their early twenties with no history of speech and hearing difficulties provided speech samples for the study. Two of the four speakers were born and grew up in Cantonese-speaking families in Hong Kong and the other two in Taiwanese- speaking families in Taiwan. 2.2. Test materials The test words used for investigation (Table 1) are meaningful CVC syllables, 15 in Cantonese and 17 in Taiwanese. In the test syllables, the initial C- and final -C are the plosives [p t k] and V is one of the corner vowels [i a u]. For each language, ten repetitions of the randomized test words in Chinese characters on a reading list were recorded of the speakers. Table 1: Test Cantonese and Taiwanese CVC syllables, where C = [p t k] and V = [i a u]. Cantonese CVC syllables [pit] [pat] [put] [pak] [tip] [tap] [tit] [tat] [tak] [kip] [kap] [kit] [kat] [kut] [kak] Taiwanese CVC syllables [pit] [pat] [put] [pik] [pak] [tap] [tit] [tat] [tut] [tik] [tak] [kip] [kap] [kat] [kut] [kik] [kak] 2.3. Data collection and analysis EMA (Electromagnetic Articulography) AG500 and NDI Wave were used to digitally record the synchronized audio signals and articulatory actions of the tongue during the test syllables. Throughout the recording, frequency receivers (or sensors) in small coils were fixed onto speaker’s articulators, with (i) three sensors in equidistance on the tongue tip (TT), tongue middle (TM), and tongue back (TB) and (ii) the other 463 978-1-5386-5627-3/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE ISCSLP 2018 Authorized licensed use limited to: National Tsing Hua Univ.. Downloaded on April 19,2023 at 10:44:36 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.