Vowel undershoot in production of English tense and lax vowels by Mandarin and American speakers

Abstract

Vowel undershoot (Lindblom, 1963), an effect where the articulatory gesture fails to reach the target due to the following contrary gesture (de Jong, 2004), is found to be particularly prominent (lowered F1 and shortened duration) in polysyllables (Lindblom, 1968; Moon and Lindblom, 1989). The current study investigates Mandarin and American speakers' production of English tense-lax vowels /i/-/I/ and /eI/-/ε/, and examines undershoot in monosyllabic and disyllabic words. Three Mandarin and three American speakers were recorded. Fifteen target vowels were embedded in a voiced stop-V-voiceless stop context. All disyllabic words were first-syllable stressed. Carrier sentences were of variable length to create a natural-speech-like context. F1, F2, vowel duration and utterance duration were measured. The results show that Americans did show a significant distinction between /i/-/I/ but tended to merge the formants of /eI/-/ε/ in disyllabic words, which was partly due to the coarticulation with the following syllable. They also demonstrated undershoot effect in /eI/-/ε/ but not much in /i/-/I/. Mandarin speakers, however, could not make a significant tense-lax distinction, and showed formant undershoot in disyllabic words, especially tense vowels. One possible account for this effect is the influence from L1. The issue of Mandarin vowel inventory is discussed.