從實驗的角度來檢視台灣華語與美式英語元音對應關係

Mapping Vowels from American English to Taiwanese Mandarin:An experimental perspective

王俞升(Wang, Yu Sheng)

指導教授 ： 張月琴 ； 謝豐帆

國立清華大學/人文社會學院/語言學研究所/碩士(2015年)

摘要

一直以來語音相似性因素被認為對於借詞音韻現象扮演不可或缺的角色。本研究主要以相似性感知評比實驗（similarity rating）及語音轉寫（transcription）實驗探討台灣華語母語者對於美式英語的中元音[ɛ]、[ɚ]、[ɔ]以及前低元音[æ]和華語元音之間的對應關係，並將實驗結果進一步和Lin (2008a) 借詞語料庫研究做比較與討論，以驗證其對於漢英借詞元音對應原則的假設。此外，我們嘗試將實驗元音聲學數值，利用歐基里得距離公式（Euclidean distance）的概念計算聽者對於兩元音的感知距離，並假設相對應兩元音感知距離若越短，相似性感知分數則越高，實驗結果大致呈現這樣的趨勢。
研究結果大致符合Lin所主張：中、英元音對應時，舌位前-後徵性重要性高於其他元音徵性的特色(Lin, 2008a, 2008b, 2009)。然而，本實驗之各項實驗結果仍和過去語料庫結果有些許出入。例如：語料庫結果中，我們會觀察到較多英語[æ]對應到漢語[a]的例子，然而在我們實驗結果，英語[æ]的最佳對應並非華語[a]。我們認為上述的差異應與漢語音位組合限制（phonotactics）有關：雖然漢語中能與[ei]相拼的合法音節組合數少於[a]，但這樣的頻率效應在實驗結果中不顯著，因而實驗結果並不會受此因素影響。這或許能說明為何借詞語料庫與本實驗結果會有不一致的現象。
綜上所述，本論文的主要貢獻為驗證借詞並非單純依賴音韻徵性對應，或是由表層聲學訊號（raw acoustic signals）的近似與否來決定(Yip2006)。此外，本研究更提出一個新的“干擾因素”，即音位組合限制（phonotactics）和合法音節數也會對於借詞結果造成影響。

關鍵字

借詞音韻學 ； 感知相似性 ； 英文借詞 ； 感知距離

並列摘要

It has been noted that vowel backness is largely preserved in English-to-Mandarin loanwords, while vowel height is not. This asymmetry contradicts the native phonological patterns in that vowel backness for mid vowels is non-phonemic in Mandarin. This study attempts to re-examine this issue by carrying out similarity rating experiment and transcription task for the mapping of English vowels [ɛ, ɚ, ɔ, æ] to Mandarin vowel system. Moreover, the acoustic similarities between the vowels in English and Mandarin are calculated by measuring the Euclidean distances in formant space for each English-Mandarin vowel pair in the stimuli. Further implementations of linear regression analysis revealed that the variance in the rating results is largely explained by the acoustic similarity, supporting the effectiveness of our rating results in the phonetic model. By comparing our experiment results to Lin (2008a)’s loanword corpus study, this study mostly supports the vowel adaptation principle in loanword phonology proposed in Lin (2008a), namely the feature preservation constraint of vowel backness is dominant over that of vowel height in loanword adaptation. However, there are still some discrepancies between our findings and Lin’s corpus study. For instance, [æ] in English is mostly translated to [a] in Mandarin in the corpus, but our experimental results reveal that [ei] in Taiwan Mandarin has the highest perceptual similarity to [æ] in English. This discrepancy may be attributed to the fact that the combinations of C-[ei] sequences is more limited than C-[a] sequences in Mandarin; this distributional asymmetry plays a key role in loanword adaptation but is not a factor in our perceptual experiment. Therefore, the inconsistency between perceptual similarity and loanword phonology may be accounted for by the phonotactic or distributional constraints in the recipient language -- Mandarin. Putting together, the findings of this study supports the hypothesis that the vowel selection in loanword phonology is not determined by a single phonological constraint or solely the acoustic similarity, but by factoring in all the related attributes in different models, including phonetics, phonology, orthography, etc.

並列關鍵字

Loanword phonology ； Perceptual similarity ； English loanword ； Perceptual distance

參考文獻

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