DECLARATIVE INTONATION IN MALAYSIAN MANDARIN: AN EXPLORATORY ACOUSTIC STUDY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/IJHPL.934002Keywords:
Acoustic Analysis, Declarative Intonation, Malaysian Mandarin, Pitch Range, Tone RealizationAbstract
This study adopts an experimental-phonetic approach to conduct a small-scale exploratory acoustic comparison of declarative intonation in Malaysian Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin. The participants consisted of two male Malaysian Chinese speakers and two male Mainland Chinese speakers. Four declarative sentences with controlled focus positions were used as speech materials, each representing one of the four Mandarin lexical tones. The analysis examined sentence pitch range, prosodic-word pitch range, syllable-level pitch range, and the in-sentence realization of lexical tones. Fundamental frequency data were extracted using Mini-Speech-Lab and converted from hertz into semitones and normalized percentage values. The results show that, in the present sample, the Malaysian Chinese speakers display a relatively narrower overall pitch range than the Mainland Chinese speakers, mainly due to a lower upper pitch limit, while the lower pitch limit differs less between the two groups. The two groups pattern similarly in the location of the lower pitch limit, but differ in upper pitch alignment and pitch fluctuation patterns. Malaysian Chinese speakers generally preserve the basic characteristics of the four lexical tones, although some tonal weakening and local deviation can be observed in connected speech. These findings should be interpreted as preliminary observations based on a small, controlled dataset.
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