Articulatory and Acoustic Features of Mandarin /ɹ/: A Preliminary Study

Rhotic sounds in the world's languages have a wide range of variants, and are famous for their complexity in production. The current study examined the articulatory and acoustic features of Mandarin /retroflex r/ using ultrasound imaging. The results showed that similar to English rhotics, Mandarin /retroflex r/ could be articulated with various tongue shapes that were usually categorized as the bunched gesture (tongue tip pointing down) or retroflex gesture (tongue tip curling up). The variation between bunched and retroflex /retroflex r/, however, was only found in the postvocalic and syllabic /retroflex r/. Mandarin prevocalic /r/ was produced with the tongue tip pointing down (bunched gesture). Acoustically, Mandarin /retroflex r/ had a higher F3 than English /retroflex r/ in the prevocalic and syllabic positions, and a higher F2 in the prevocalic position, indicating less rhoticity in Mandarin /retroflex r/ than in English /retroflex r/. Moreover, frication noise was often observed in the prevocalic /retroflex r/, but not in all prevocalic tokens. Large interspeaker variation was found in using frication noise in the production of prevocalic /retroflex r/.