On the Perception of Data Mining based Bladealveolar and Retroflex Affricates and Fricatives

Mandarin Chinese contains a number of retroflex and blade-alveolar sounds in its phonological system. This system is compared to that of the East Liaoning (EL) and West Liaoning (WL) systems, spoken in northeast China. To establish the distribution of these sounds in both dialects, a perception experiment was held. The stimuli consisted of 24 frequent two-character words containing the target retroflexes and blade-alveolars (/ts, tsʰ, s; tʂ, tʂʰ, ʂ/), as well as 24 corresponding pseudo-words. A Mandarin speaker was recruited to read the word list and 16 listeners (eight from WL and eight from EL) were required to choose which pronunciation was correct (i. e. corresponded to their dialect). The results showed a clear difference in distribution of these sounds between WL and EL, corresponding to place of articulation.