The effect of speakers' sex on voice onset time in Mandarin stops.
The goal of the present study is to examine the effect of speakers' gender on voice onset time in Mandarin speakers' stop productions. Word-initial lingual stops were elicited from 10 male and 10 female Mandarin speakers using a word-repetition task. The results revealed differentiated voice onset time (VOT) patterns between the two genders for all four lingual stops on raw VOT values. After factoring out speech rate variation, gender-related differences remained for voiced stops only with females' VOTs being shorter than males. The results, together with previous findings from other languages, suggest a sociolinguistic/stylistic account on the relation between gender and VOT that vary in a language-specific manner.
Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, Alberta T1J 3M4, Canada. fangfang.li@uleth.ca
Fangfang
F
Li
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012737:Sex Factors; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult