Develops a method of analyzing and describing the acoustic properties of fricatives, which consists of making frequency spectra using the Fast Fourier Transform and then analyzing the spectra in terms of critical bands. The six fricatives of Chinese are analyzed by this method, and comparison with other languages is made. (SED)

From a survey of over a thousand "diapoints" emerges a clear distributional pattern of nasal vowels in the contemporary dialects of China. They tend to occupy the lower portion of the vowel space. Three hypotheses are proposed to explain this phenomenon and each hypothesis is examined against a broad data base. (Author/TL)