A Statistical Analysis of Factors Affecting VOT and F0 in Plosive Sounds across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

Abstract

Purpose: To conduct a statistical analysis of the acoustic features of VOT and F0 in plosive sounds across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The goal is to determine the impact of three factors—manner of articulation, place of articulation, and tone type—on VOT and F0, providing theoretical support for future "simultaneous cross-linguistic comparison studies" of plosive sounds in these three languages.

Approach/Methodology/Design: A total of 792 word-initial plosives were selected from news broadcasts of official media in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Three variables—manner of articulation, place of articulation, and tone type—were set, and the S-N-K test and Bonferroni multiple comparison method were used to evaluate whether these variables had significant effects on the word-initial plosives.

Findings: For VOT, the manner of articulation has the most significant effect across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The place of articulation has a lesser impact, while tone type has no effect on VOT, except in Korean, where there is no tone distinction for word-initial plosives. For F0, tone type significantly influences F0 in Chinese, while manner and place of articulation have minimal impact. In Japanese, both manner of articulation and tone type significantly affect F0, but place of articulation does not. In Korean, only the manner of articulation significantly affects F0.

Originality/Value: Previous studies on word-initial plosives in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have primarily focused on VOT, with limited research on F0, especially for Chinese and Japanese, where studies on F0 are scarce. This study is the first to analyze different tone types of Chinese and Japanese as variables in the acoustic analysis of plosive sounds. Past studies typically involved general native speakers, with little emphasis on the standard pronunciations of professional broadcasters. With the introduction of Chinese-Korean bilingual broadcasting majors in 2021 and Chinese-Japanese bilingual broadcasting majors in 2024 in China, this research also provides theoretical support for the education and training of multilingual broadcasting professionals in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.