Acoustic patterns of Chinese weak word forms

The article considers vowel and consonant modifications and omissions within the phonemics of the Chinese syllable. An acoustic study of spontaneous speech produced by six young females who are Mandarin Chinese speakers was carried out. The study focuses on the utterance parts characterized by fast speech rate where weak forms of notional and function words and word groups were found. They emerged as a result of fortis initials voicing, replacement of affricates with stops and fricatives, vowel quality reduction, diphthong monophthonging, omissions of initials, parts of finals and even the whole finals. In a number of instances, it gave way to potential homophony, when modified words or word groups demonstrated acoustic similarity with other Chinese words and word groups. Linguists and common Chinese speakers are aware of modification and homophony possibilities. The issue is mentioned in linguistic literature; modified words and word groups function in Chinese social networks as casual neologisms with modified hieroglyphs.