15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Frequency Analysis of the Vowels in Cantonese from 50 Male and 50 Female Speakers

Eric Zee

City University of Hong Kong, China

The purpose of the study is to obtain measurements of the formant frequencies of the 7 long vowels [i: y: ɛ: oe: a: ɔ: u:] in the (C)V: syllables and 7 half-long vowels [i y ɛ oe a ɔ u] in the (C)V:S syllables, and 4 short vowels [ɪ ɐ ɵ ʊ] in the (C)VS syllables in Cantonese. Results show that (1) in the F1/F2 plane the half-long vowels except [a] are centralized relative to the long vowels; (2) the center Fvalues for [ɪ ɐ ʊ] are similar to those for [ɛ: a: ɔ:], similar to what is reported in Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996); (3) both (1) and (2) are true for the male and female speakers; and (4) for both the long and half-long vowels, the distance between the mid vowels and the high vowels in the F1/F2 plane is larger than the distance between the mid vowels and the low vowel [a] for the female speakers, but for the male speakers the distances are similar.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Zee, Eric (2003): "Frequency analysis of the vowels in Cantonese from 50 male and 50 female speakers", In ICPhS-15, 1117-1120.