몽골어 마찰음의 음향적 특성에 관한 실험음성학적 연구

Abstract

This article aims to examine some acoustic properties of Mongolian fricatives. It is generally known that there are only voiceless fricatives in Mongolian without any voiced counterparts. However, in terms of place of articulation, Mongolian fricatives have various kinds of sounds, such as dental [s], alveopalatal [ʃ], palatal [xj], and velar [x] sounds. Given that little has been known about the acoustic properties of Mongolian fricatives, this study is motivated by an interest in examining their phonetic values and comparing them to provide the most adequate system for the acoustics of Mongolian fricatives. Thus, this study investigated three acoustic properties of Mongolian fricatives produced by 10 native speakers of Mongolian. First, the measured intensity of friction showed that both [s] and [ʃ] were much stronger than [xj] as well as [x]. Second, Mongolian fricatives did not demonstrate any voicing characteristics in every waveform and spectrogram. Specifically, in all cases no waveform showed the periodicity of the signal. Likewise, the voice bar associated with the quality of voicing was not present in the spectrogram. Third, in order to verify that Mongolian fricatives should be divided by four different places of articulation, peaks in the spectrum of fricatives were measured. It was noted that the frequency of peaks were significantly decreased as the point where a constriction was taking place had been changed from dental to velar region ([s] > [ʃ] > [xj] > [x]).