Imitation of F0 tone contours by Mandarin and English speakers is both categorical and continuous

This paper examines the intonation of English statements and questions produced by Vietnamese speakers at two differing levels of proficiency. The goal of the study is three-fold: (1) analysing the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in information-seeking questions, namely Yes-No question, Or-question, Tag-question and Wh-question, (2) evaluating which characteristics of the L2 English intonation can be clearly derived from the observation of the data, and (3) whether the L2 English intonation patterns are transferred from Vietnamese. A data set of 25 sentences that included 5 statements and 20 information-seeking questions were constructed. Ten native Australian English speakers as a control group and 20 Southern Vietnamese speakers of English (10 beginners and 10 advanced speakers) were recorded. The final tunes (the direction of the final F0 contours) of the sentences were analysed. The result showed that while the advanced speakers of English mostly produced intonation patterns that are typically used by native English speakers, beginning speakers of English used a variety of tunes, several of which are deviate from the native-like standard and clearly transferred from the tone contours in Vietnamese. The findings of this study have an original and significant contribution to the literature because it investigated into the prosodic transfer of intonation patterns between two typologically distinct languages: English, a stress accent language and Vietnamese, a contrastive contour tone language and has implications for intonation teaching.

Abstract: The ability of Mandarin learners to express emotion in Mandarin has received little attention. This study examines how English L1 users express emotions in Mandarin and how this expression differs from that of Mandarin L1 users. Scenarios were adopted to elicit joy, anger, sadness, fear, and neutrality. Both groups articulated anger, joy, and fear with a high pitch. Both groups also employed high intensity for anger and joy and low intensity for sadness and fear. Learners generally employed larger F0 ranges than native speakers, particularly for anger and fear. Learners articulated level tones with lengthened duration and contour tones with shortened duration, affecting the correctness of the portrayal of emotions. Learners used a similar intensity range for all emotions, whereas native speakers tended to vary the intensity with different emotions. The results have implications for teaching Mandarin as a second language with special reference to prosodic naturalness in expressing emotions.

This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers’ Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n= 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n= 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n= 40) took part in a multiday Mandarin‐like artificial language learning task. Participants were asked to repeat a syllable–tone combination immediately after hearing it. Half of all participants were exposed to speech from 1 talker (low variability) while the other half heard speech from 4 talkers (high variability). Half of the L1 English participants were given daily explicit instruction on Mandarin tone contours, while the other half were not. Tone accuracy was measured by L1 Mandarin raters (n= 104) who classified productions according to their perceived tonal category. Explicit instruction of tone contours facilitated L1 English participants’ production of rising and falling tone contours. High variability input alone had no main effect on participants’ productions but interacted with explicit instruction to improve participants’ productions of high‐level tone contours. These results motivate an L2 tone production training approach that consists of explicit tone instruction followed by gradual exposure to more variable speech.

Previous studies have shown that English speakers pay attention to pitch height rather than direction, whereas Mandarin speakers are more sensitive to pitch direction than height in perception of lexical tones. The present study addresses if a second language (L2, i.e., Mandarin) overrides the influence of a native language (L1, i.e., English) in modulating listeners' use of pitch cues in the perception of tones in a third language (L3, i.e., Cantonese). English-speaking L2 learners (L2ers) of Mandarin constituted the target group. Mandarin speakers and English speakers without knowledge of Mandarin were included as control groups. In Experiment 1, all groups, naïve to Cantonese tones, discriminated Cantonese tones by distinguishing either a contour tone from a level tone (pitch direction pair) or a level tone from another level tone (pitch height pair). The results showed that L2ers patterned differently from both control groups with regard to pitch cues under the influence of L2 experience. The acoustics of the tones also affected all listeners' discrimination. In Experiment 2, L2ers were instructed to identify Mandarin tones to measure their sensitivity to L2 tones. The results showed that L2ers' sensitivity to L2 tones is not necessarily correlated with their perception of L3 tones.

The results reported in this paper indicate that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese rate the perceptual similarities among the lexical tones of Mandarin differently than do native speakers of American English. Mandarin listeners were sensitive to tone contour while English listeners attended to pitch levels. Chinese listeners also rated tones that are neutralized by phonological tone sandhi rules in Mandarin as more similar to each other than did English speakers – indicating a role of phonology in determining perceptual salience. In two further experiments, we found that some of these differences were eliminated when the listening task focused listeners’ attention on the auditory properties of the stimuli, but, interestingly, a degree of language specificity remained even in the most purely psychophysical listening tasks with speech stimuli.

In communication, speakers and listeners need ways to highlight certain information and relegate other information to the background. They also need to keep track of what information they (think they) have already communicated to the listener, and of the listeners' (supposed) knowledge of topics and referents. This knowledge and its layout in the utterance is commonly referred to as information structure, i.e., the degree to which propositions and referents are given or new. All languages have 'chosen' different ways to encode such information structure, for instance by modifying the pitch or intensity of the vocal signal or the order of words in a sentence. In this study, we assess whether the use of pitch to signal new information holds in typologically different languages such as English and Spanish by analyzing three population group monolingual California English speakers, bilingual speakers of English and Spanish from California (Chicano Spanish), and monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers from Mexico City. Our study goes beyond previous work in several respects. First, most current work is based on sentences just read or elicited in response to highly standardized and often somewhat artificial stimuli whose generalizability to more naturalistic settings may be questionable. We opted instead to use semidirected interviews whose more naturalistic setting provides data with a higher degree of authenticity. Second, in order to deal with the resulting higher degree of noise in the data as well as the inherent multifactoriality of the data, we are using state-of-the-art statistical methods to explore our data, namely generalized linear mixed-effects modeling, to accommodate speaker- and lexically-specific variability. Despite the noisy data, we find that contour tones including H+L or L+H sequences signal new information, and that items encoding new information also exhibit proportionally longer stressed vowels, than those encoding given information. We also find cross-dialectal variation between monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers on the one hand and monolingual English speakers and Chicanos on the other: Mexican Spanish speakers modify pitch contours less than monolingual English speakers, whereas the English patterns affect even the Spanish pronunciation of early bilinguals. Our findings, therefore, corroborate Gussenhoven's theory (2002) that some aspects of intonation are shared cross-linguistically (longer vowel length & higher pitch for new info), whereas others are encoded language-specifically and vary even across dialects (pitch excursion & the packaging of information structure).

Infants and adults found a change from a less peripheral vowel to a more peripheral vowel to be easier to detect than the reverse direction. However, the perceptual processes underlying vowel directional asymmetries remain to be fully understood. This study explored asymmetries in lexical tone perception by native Mandarin and native English speakers. Fewer asymmetries were found among Mandarin speakers than among English speakers due likely to a lack of phonological categories of lexical tones in English. However, some asymmetric patterns were common between the two groups. Both groups found a change from Mandarin tone 1 to other tones more challenging than the reverse direction, but the opposite was true for Mandarin tone 4. Relative greater degrees of difficulty on speaker normalization for a level tone in comparison to a contour tone may have been responsible for this result.

Mechanisms of tone sandhi rule application by tonal and non-tonal non-native speakers

The effects of perceptual training on speech production of Mandarin sandhi tones by tonal and non-tonal speakers

Native speakers of a language are able to easily detect non-native “accents”—usually a perceived accent is attributed to phonemic- and phonetic- level information. However, a growing body of work suggests that non-native speakers also exhibit differences from native speakers at the prosodic level. Differences are exhibited in the placement of lexical stress and phrasal accents, as well as the acoustic cues used in prominence production; prosodic differences in production appear to pattern in (native)-language-specific ways (Morrill, ICPhS Proceedings, 2015). In this experiment, we ask (1) whether differences in the realization of tonal contours are perceived by listeners, and (2) whether perceptual discriminability is patterning according to speakers’ native language. Participants listened to low-pass filtered phrases from the Stella passage recordings on the GMU Speech Accent Archive—produced by native speakers of English, Mandarin, Korean, Arabic, and Turkish—and judged whether speakers were saying the same thing. Results indicate that participants were less likely to rate two phrases as the same (even when they were) if they had been produced by speakers of different native languages. Patterns of discriminability across language pairings are attributed to differences in the number and timing of tonal events (e.g., pitch accents).

This paper reports a study of the production of Thai vowels, consonants, and tones by native English speakers using two forms of evaluation: acoustic measurements and auditory evaluation by native Thai-speaking listeners. The investigation focused on (a) the acoustic parameters along which the two groups of speakers differ, and (b) which of these acoustic parameters influenced native listeners' judgments of perceived degree of accentedness. Three native Thai speakers and 6 native English speakers were tape recorded in an oral reading task. Speech analysis showed that the two groups of speakers differed more along the spectral dimension (namely formant frequencies and fundamental frequency) than the temporal dimension (namely voice-onset time and vowel duration). When the productions of both the native speakers and the non-native speakers were rated for accentedness, the rating data showed that non-native production can be readily distinguished from native production. Only some non-native tokens were judged as 'native-like'. Moreover, the rating scores for the non-native speakers were lower in level tones than contour tones, suggesting different degrees of difficulty for each tone. When the acoustic data were regressed on the rating data, significant predictors were spectral in nature and were found mostly for level tones. Moreover, no correlation between years of experience with Thai and the rating scores was found. Results are discussed in terms of a 'holistic' versus an 'analytic' approach in tone processing by adults, inherent acoustic characteristics of individual tones as well as quantity and quality of the native input. Furthermore, the fact that some non-native tokens were judged as 'native-like' seems to challenge the claim that segmental as well as suprasegmental errors arise from the loss of ability to learn non-native sounds.

This study compares the prosodic characteristics of L2-Mandarin as spoken by L1-English speakers using L1-Mandarin utterances. The acoustic correlates examined include individual tonal realizations, interactions of tones in sequence, durational features and intensity envelopes. L2-Mandarin users realize the contour tones RISE and FALL with both rising and falling pitch, and produce the second tone of disyllabic words with more varied pitch. L2-users employ larger vowel durations, syllable durations and larger variation over vowel intervals in sequential pairs than L1-Mandarin users. Both user groups show similar intensity envelopes. Implications of this study include tailoring language training programs that counterbalance L1 influences.