1987 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

Experimental Acoustic Study of the Ryukyu Dialects -With Speical Reference to its Characteristic Speech Sounds-

Research Project

Project/Area Number	61510211
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	国語学
Research Institution	Naruto University of Education
Principal Investigator	IMAISHI Motohisa Prof. Naruto Univ. of Education Dept. of Japanese Language Education, 学校教育学部, 教授 (80093574)
Project Period (FY)	1986 – 1987
Keywords	Japanese / Ryukyu dialect / Vowel / Formant / Acoustic phonetics / Sound spectrograph / Spectral analysis / LPC / AbS
Research Abstract	This is experimental acoustic study of Ryukyu dialects, with special reference to its characteristic speech sounds. I made a collection of the dialectal speech sounds. The characteristic vowels were analyzed mostly by means of the digital Soundspectrograph. Some of them were re-analyzed using the Linear Prediction Coding (LPC) technique and the Analysis by- Symthesis(AbS) technique, which enables us to measure most accurately the formant frequencies of a given vowels. Process of centralizing dialectal vowels in the upper middle region is an interesting phenomenum. [I^^<<two over dot>>],[W^^<<two over dot>>]or[e^^<<two over dot>>], though undeterminable as regards the exact position, may be indicative of the ferminal point of the vomel centralization. And F_2 range may concentrate in the vicinity of 1400Hz to 1500Hz.