关键词: 字母词; 普通话; 塞音; VOT; GAP; 声学特征

Abstract:   The research aims to make comparative analysis of the acoustic features of the stops in lettered-words and Chinese Mandarin, so as to discover if Chinese Mandarin stop system has been changed by the widely-used letteredwords.VOT (Voice Onset Time) and GAP (or Closure) are measured for the two groups of samples, the stops in lettered-words and the stops in two-character Chinese phrases. Analyzing the VOT of the samples, the research finds that, in lettered-words pronunciation, there is no voiced stop at all, and the original voiced stops in English have changed into unaspirated voiceless stops. Statistic analysis shows that there is no significant difference between the VOT of the stops in lettered-words and those in Chinese phrases. Moreover, the acoustic pattern figures of the stops are constructed, based on the averages of VOT and GAP. The figures show that the stops in the two groups of samples have the same acoustic patterns, which further proves that they are of the same class of sound. The result reveals that both the stops in lettered-words and those in Chinese Mandarin are voiceless stops with the distinctive feature of being aspirated or unaspirated. Though widely used for decades, lettered-words haven’t brought voiced stops from English into Chinese Mandarin, which keeps the important distinctive feature [±aspirated], so the stop system in Chinese Mandarin has not changed.

Keywords: lettered-word; Chinese Mandarin; stop; VOT; GAP; acoustic feature