A cross-gender examination of the breathy tone in Green Mong

Abstract

Tone is generally thought of as a pitch difference that carries information regarding word meaning, but tone often correlates with phonation type as well as pitch. This paper presents the acoustic portion of a cross-gender study on acoustic and perceptual correlates of the breathy tone in Green Mong. Three male and three female native speakers of Green Mong residing in the Detroit area were asked to produce a series of target words containing the breathy tone and comparison tones in sentence context. Target words were minimal sets in which only tone varied. Each speaker produced a sequence of minimal sets containing each possible voiceless stop and voiced fricative onset of Green Mong. Vowel identity also varied across minimal sets. Four acoustic correlates of tone (fundamental frequency or F0, F0 contour, duration, and breathiness) were measured in each target word. Degree of breathiness was measured by subtracting the amplitude of F0 from the amplitude of the second harmonic at the durational midpoint of the vowel. Each of these four acoustic correlates will be examined in the breathy tone and the comparison tones, and a cross-gender comparison of the results will be presented.