The Vowel Quality Influence On The Stress Of Disyllabic Words In Standard Chinese

Stress has been a major topic of phonetic study. There are many differences between the alphabetic languages' stress and pictographic languages' stress. Chinese is a standard representation of pictographic language. Scholars carried out a lot of researches studying the stress of Chinese and achieved fruitful results. However, there are comparatively few people discussed about the vowel influence toward the stress of Standard Chinese.This thesis is a phonetically experimental study aims at the word stress in Standard Chinese. The major discussion is whether there is any relationship between the vowel quality and the positioning of stress.The writer chose two vowels e[γ] and i[i] as the study object, analyzing the non-coda disyllabic words composed by e[Y] and i[i]. Using speech analyzing software Praat and Cool Edit to draw the wave form, intensity form and spectrogram, the writer compared the duration and intensity of each syllable in the disyllabic words to determine the stressed syllable is on the syllable with e[γ] or on the syllable with i[i]. For words that are difficult to recognize, the writer carried out another hearing test to help to decide which the stressed syllable is.The experiment shows that: most of the stressed syllables are on the ones with e[γ], which account for 94.3% of the total select words 92, only 5.7% are on the syllables with i[i]. The result indicates that there are significant differences between the two vowels e[γ] and i[i]. This artic further testified that the vowel quality does have some influence on the placement of stressed syllables in Standard Chinese.