Effects of Entering Tone on Vowel Duration and Formants in Nanjing Dialect.

There are five tones in Nanjing Dialect, including four open-syllable tones and one entering tone with a syllable-final glottal stop, which is not found in Beijing Mandarin. Each checked syllable normally corresponds to an open syllable with the same vowel but different tones. This study focuses on the acoustic comparisons of the two kinds of syllables to discuss the acoustic discrepancies between checked and open syllables in Nanjing Dialect, specifically with regards to vowel quality. The acoustic parameters include the duration, the first formant (F1), the second formant (F2), and the third formant (F3) of the vowels. The results of vowel duration indicate that the entering tone is still the shortest among the five tones. The relatively higher F1, F2 and F3 in the entering tone suggest the effect of a glottal stop coda on the vowel quality.