The effect of speaker gender and talker proficiency on the realization of Taiwan Min /dz/ among young speakers

This study examined how speaker gender and talker proficiency affected realization of Taiwan Min /dz/ among young speakers of the 漳 Chiang and Mix dialect. Ten males and seven females with adequate proficiency were recruited to perform a paragraph reading task. Five major variant categories were observed, including dental sibilant, dental nonsibilant, velar obstruent, lateral, and retroflex. Gender played a role in some variant choices. Males used dental sibilants and retroflexes more often than females, while females used liquids more often than males. Dental nonsibilants and velar obstruents showed more complex distributions involving both gender and speaker dialect. Impact of talker proficiency was also found. High-level speakers generally used velar obstruents and retroflexes more often, and dental nonsibilants less often, than their mid-level counterparts. Dental sibilants and liquids showed distributions that were less straightforward and involved intricate interactions among gender, proficiency, and speaker dialect. Despite the range of variant choices, talkers were rather conservative, and most limited their choices to only a couple of variants for /dz/ realization. Males generally showed high intra- and inter-syllabic consistency regardless of their proficiency levels, while females showed a proficiency split. High-level females had high intra-syllabic consistency but low inter-syllabic consistency, while mid-level females had low intra- and inter-syllabic consistency. This study thus demonstrated that talkers’ realization of the variable Min /dz/ is a complex interaction among speaker gender, dialect, and proficiency.