Tone clarity in mixed pitch/phonation type tones

Abstract

Lexical tone identity is often determined by a complex of acoustic cues. In Green Mong, a Hmong-Mien language of Southeast Asia, a small subset of tones is characterized by phonation type in addition to pitch height, pitch contour, and duration, which characterize the remaining tones of the language. In tones that incorporate multiple cues to tonal identity, what makes a tone clear, or easy to recognize? This study examines acoustic and perceptual data to address this question. Six native speakers of Green Mong were asked to produce 132 phonological CV words in sentence context, using a conversational speaking style. Seventeen native speakers of the language were then asked to categorize three tones which have similar falling contours, but are differentiated by phonation type (breathy, creaky, and modal). Tokens that were correctly identified by 100% of the listeners were compared with tokens that were relatively poorly identified. Data indicate that the breathy- and creaky-voiced tones are less susceptible to identification errors than the modal-voiced tone. However, the clearest tokens of the three tones are also differentiated by details of pitch contour shape, and by duration. Similarities and differences between acoustic cue values for the best and worst tokens will be discussed.