Abstract
Discrete phonological phenomena form our conscious experience of language: continuous changes in pitch appear as distinct tones to the speakers of tone languages, whereas the speakers of quantity languages experience duration categorically. The categorical nature of our linguistic experience is directly reflected in the traditionally clear-cut linguistic classification of languages into tonal or non-tonal. However, some evidence suggests that duration and pitch are fundamentally interconnected and co-vary in signaling word meaning in non-tonal languages as well. We show that pitch information affects real-time language processing in a (non-tonal) quantity language. The results suggest that there is no unidirectional causal link from a genetically-based perceptual sensitivity towards pitch information to the appearance of a tone language. They further suggest that the contrastive categories tone and quantity may be based on simultaneously co-varying properties of the speech signal and the processing system, even though the conscious experience of the speakers may highlight only one discrete variable at a time.
Highlights
The ability to understand words in natural speech entails rapid conversion of acoustic phonetic information into meaning
Duration and f0 variation have often been seen as mutually exclusive ways to express phonological categories [3], [4]: whereas the latter is used by and associated with so-called tone languages like Mandarin Chinese [5], segmental duration has been taken as the main vehicle to signal lexical contrasts in so-called quantity languages [6], [7 for an overview], of which Finnish is an often cited example [3], [7,8,9,10]
At the outset, dividing languages into types according to their sound structure seems fairly straightforward: For the speakers of tone languages - such as Mandarin Chinese - the physically continuous changes in pitch appear as distinct tones that determine the lexical meaning of a segmental string (e.g., Chinese mawith high level tone ‘‘mother’’ vs. mawith falling-rising tone ‘‘horse’’); the speakers of quantity languages experience sounds as categorically long or short and changes in speech segment duration can crucially differentiate word meaning (Finnish tuli ‘‘fire’’ vs. tuuli ‘‘wind’’)
Summary
The ability to understand words in natural speech entails rapid conversion of acoustic phonetic information into meaning. It is generally agreed that non-tonal languages use pitch changes (f0 variation) in other functions only; for example, to mark aspects of information structure, like focus, or extra-linguistic phenomena such as emotional content [3], [12]. This would be the case for the speakers of languages, such as Finnish, that have quantity, but no tonal system (quantity languages): Whereas they would be sensitive to durational information in lexical perception [15], for them pitch changes would be functional only outside the lexical domain. As is generally assumed, in Finnish pitch would be excluded from signaling formal categories at the lexical level [7], [16]
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