Path of Vowel Raising in Chengdu Dialect of Mandarin
This research addresses a specific phonetic change in a regional dialect, providing incremental insights into sound change mechanisms for linguists.
The study tackled the problem of vowel raising in the Chengdu dialect of Mandarin by conducting an acoustic analysis of /a/ in /Xan/ contexts across age and gender groups, confirming that young speakers realize /a/ as [epsilon] while older speakers mostly use [ae], with female speakers raising more than males.
He and Rao (2013) reported a raising phenomenon of /a/ in /Xan/ (X being a consonant or a vowel) in Chengdu dialect of Mandarin, i.e. /a/ is realized as [epsilon] for young speakers but [ae] for older speakers, but they offered no acoustic analysis. We designed an acoustic study that examined the realization of /Xan/ in speakers of different age (old vs. young) and gender (male vs. female) groups, where X represents three conditions: 1) unaspirated consonants: C ([p], [t], [k]), 2) aspirated consonants: Ch ([ph], [th], [kh]), and 3) high vowels: V ([i], [y], [u]). 17 native speakers were asked to read /Xan/ characters and the F1 values are extracted for comparison. Our results confirmed the raising effect in He and Rao (2013), i.e., young speakers realize /a/ as [epsilon] in /an/, whereas older speakers in the most part realize it as [ae]. Also, female speakers raise more than male speakers within the same age group. Interestingly, within the /Van/ condition, older speakers do raise /a/ in /ian/ and /yan/. We interpret this as /a/ first assimilates to its preceding front high vowels /i/ and /y/ for older speakers, which then becomes phonologized in younger speakers in all conditions, including /Chan/ and /Can/. This shows a possible trajectory of the ongoing sound change in the Chengdu dialect.