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

Variants in the Pronunciation of Voiced/Voiceless Consonant Pairs in Taiwanese Russian (Based on Audial and Acoustic Analysis)

Lydia V. Ignatkina (1), Ching-Gwo Chang (2)

(1) Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia
(2) Tamkang University, Taiwan

This study describes Chinese-Russian phonetic interference. Pairs of Russian voiced/voiceless consonants are analysed for variants of pronunciation. Two male and two female Taiwanese informants read a sample text containing all the Russian phonemes distributed in the same proportions as in Russian speech. The side of the text was 2,500 phonemes based on standard modern pronunciation. The sample for the experiment was recorded in the Phonetics Laboratory of St.Petersburg University. A group of professors of Russian as a foreign language ranked the level of reading by the Taiwanese as average to somewhat above average. The recording was subjected to evaluation by ear and acoustic analysis. The pronunciation of 2,788 consonants (1,200 voiced and 1,588 voiceless) was analysed. Spectral characteristics of non-standard realizations of consonants by the Taiwanese readers were compared:
   (*) to standard (correct) realizations of consonants produced by the same speakers and (*) to the same sample text rendered correctly by two native speakers of standard Russian. This process generated 667 sonagrams and the same number of oscillograms.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Ignatkina, Lydia V. / Chang, Ching-Gwo (2003): "Variants in the pronunciation of voiced/voiceless consonant pairs in Taiwanese Russian (based on audial and acoustic analysis)", In ICPhS-15, 1593-1594.