This study explores how the voice quality is encoded in Zhangzhou Southern Min, a Sinitic dialect spoken in South Fujian province of mainland China. Empirically, three phonation types of breathy, creaky, and modal can be identified in its monosyllabic synchronic speech, whose distribution is discovered to be primarily conditioned by vowel quality, and further constrained by pitch contour and syllable coda type. The dynamic encoding is well attested in acoustic signals with varying quantifiable waveforms and spectral tilt patterns of H1-H2, H2-H3, and H1-H3. This study contributes a new methodology to demonstrate the phonation differences in natural speech. The realisation reflects the critical fact that phonation can be encoded in a way that is far more complicated than our general assumption and expectation. It is thus imperative to ground linguistic analysis in phonetic reality to uncover its nature and to improve our cognitive knowledge of human languages.
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