Voicing Distinction of Obstruents in the Hangzhou Wu Chinese Dialect

This paper gives an acoustic phonetic description of the obstruents in the Hangzhou Wu Chinese dialect. Based on the data from 8 speakers (4 male and 4 female), obstruents were examined in terms of VOT, silent closure duration, segment duration, and spectral properties such as H1-H2, H1-F1 and H1-F3. Results suggest that VOT cannot differentiate the voiced obstruents from their voiceless counterparts, but the silent closure duration can. There is no voiced aspiration. And breathiness was detected on the vowel following the voiced category of obstruents. An acoustic consequence is that there is no segment for the voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], since it was realized as the breathiness on the following vowel. But interestingly, it is observed that syllables with [ɦ] are longer than their onset-less counterparts.