Pitch heights and contours of tones in weifang dialect: An experimental investigation

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to investigate pitch heights and contours of tones in Weifang Dialect. Eight middle- aged native speakers of Weifang Dialect participated in the experimental fieldwork. Tone types and values described in Documentation of Weifang Dialect [1] were taken as a reference. Acoustic data, including duration and fundamental frequency (F0), were extracted by using a Praat script— ProsodyPro [2] to track the pitch heights and contours of each tone-syllable sequence in the stimuli. F0 values were normalized to Log-Z (LZ) scores for speakers' individual differences [3, 4]. Tone values extracted from the LZ scores were determined according to the five-scale annotation of tones [5]. Tones in Weifang Dialect were found 324, 52, 44, and 41 in the experiment in contrast to 213, 42, 55 and 21 in Documentation of Weifang Dialect. Syllable durations of the different tones were also examined and compared.