Spectral Analysis of Mandarin Chinese Sibilant Fricatives

This paper investigates the spectral aspects of Mandarin Chinese sibilant [s, ʂ, ɕ] in three vowel context /a, i, u/. Three male and three female speakers of Mandarin Chinese were recorded. To ensure good spectral estimates, frication noise was analyzed using multitaper analysis. For comparison, one female speaker of Polish was analyzed in the same way. A strict ordering was found among Mandarin sibilants in the first spectral moment; [s] has the highest spectral moment, [ɕ] intermediate, and [ʂ] lowest. In contrast, the spectral moments of Polish [ɕ] and [ʂ] presented very similar values. This study also found a strong acoustic effect of the rounded vowel. The noise spectra in the [u] context appear to have a distinct narrow-bandwidth peak at a higher frequency that sometimes increases the first spectral moment.