A Study on Landmark Verification of Mandarin Alveolar-palatal Consonants

Due to the trait of Mandarin syllable structure, mandarin alveolar-palatal consonants tc(j), tc ^h (q), c(x) can only be followed by vowels starting with i(i) or y(ü), it probably means that Mandarin acoustic landmarks of these phones are different from English acoustic landmarks. On the basis of the hypothesis, this paper proposed a method to verify landmarks of Mandarin alveolar-palatal consonants using perceptual experiments and phones classification experiments. In the meantime, it was found that mispronunciation of mandarin alveolar-palatal consonants were common errors among second language (L2) learners. Therefore, we applied two landmark positions derived from landmarks verification experiments into pronunciation errors detection to validate the experimental result that landmarks of consonants tc(j), tc ^h (q), c(x) were probably located at midpoint and endpoint. The detection performance became satisfactory if the verified landmark positions were applied. Eventually, the experimental results illustrated that the acoustic landmarks of Mandarin alveolar-palatal consonants tc(j), tc ^h (q), c(x) were located at both midpoint and endpoint of the phones, which was not consistent with English acoustic landmarks.