ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024

Inter- and Intra-speaker Variation in the Acoustic Realizations of Quzhou Wu Tones

Lei Wang, Xinyue Yao, Bijun Ling, Xinlu Yang

The present investigation presents a multi-speaker acoustic study on the citation tones in Quzhou Wu. Ten native speakers participated in a production experiment. Fine-grained phonetic data documented the inter-and intra-speaker variation in the f0 contours of the tone categories. The results showed that inter-speaker variation is present in all tone categories and inter-speaker variation is greater than intra-speaker variation. The present investigation contributes to both the phonetic description of languages with complex tone systems and the documentation of inter-individual within-category variation.