An Acoustic Study Of Reduplicated Erhua Rhymes In Jishou Dialect

The study is about the analysis of the erhua rhyme in reduplicated form from the perspective view of acoustic phonetics in Jishou dialect situated in the north of Hunan China.Data of the acoustic experiment are from four young informants speaking Jishou dialect.Study mainly concentrates on the analysis of the four acoustic parameters,which are pitch,duration,intensity and formant.Praat and statistic software SPSS are used for the analysis of the characteristics and different types of the erhua rhyme in Jishou dialect.Pitch results present the pitch value of the monosyllabic words of four citation tones of Jishou dialect and the pitch in reduplicated erhua rhymes.The result of the pitch value of the monosyllabic words is different from the previous related studies.The pitch values in reduplicated erhua rhymes change in the citation tone of Yangping,Yinping and Qusheng.The pre-erhua rhyme words get lower pitch value than the pitch value in monosyllabic words.Duration analysis is from five different syllable structures and the results show that there is no specific rule between the duration of the pre-erhua rhyme word and erhua rhyme.The result of the intensity is similar to the result of duration.It also point outs out that no specific rule appears in the comparison between the intensity of the pre-erhua rhyme word and erhua rhyme.With the observation of both the formant spectrogram and formant chart,twelve different types of erhua rhymes in Jishou dialect are summarized.In the monophthongs,rhymes of monophthong would be deleted with the affixation of [?] or plus the affixation of [?] directly after the vowel.In the case of diphthong,the situation is the same as that in the monophthong.It also can be presented as [?] directly with the drop of two vowel phonemes in diphthong.In triphthong,there is also the deletion of the whole rhyme with the affixation of [?].Moreover,the deletion appears more in the last two phonemes with the [?] affixation.In the structure of the monophthong with nasal ending,the alveolar nasal ending is deleted with the [?] affixation and includes the deletion of the whole rhyme as well.When the nasal ending is the velar nasal,the previous vowel is influenced by nasalization and becomes a nasalized erhua rhyme.Change of the diphthong with nasal ending is similar to the monophthong with nasal ending.The second vowel phoneme and alveolar nasal ending are deleted.The erhua rhyme retains the first vowel phoneme and sometimes becomes nasalized erhua rhymes with the velar nasal ending.