Abstract
Two competing hypotheses suggest that level tones in a tone language may be separated in phonetic tone space by either the maximum possible interval or a more-or-less standard interval merely adequate for their identification. It is difficult to determine if either of these hypotheses is correct from comparison of F0 measurements in the literature. Such measurements are not controlled for individual speaker variables and are subject to variation resulting from differences in the elicitation and measurement procedures used. To eliminate such variation, an experiment was conducted using individuals who spoke (at least) two African tone languages, one of which had only two level tones while the other had three. Subjects produced utterances from their two languages consisting of tonally contrastive items in a carrier phrase. As far as practicable, matching segments were employed in the two languages. Recordings of each speaker were subjected to a standardized measurement procedure to determine the F0 of the contrasting level tones in each language. The interval between tones was then calculated to determine which of the hypotheses above better describes the relationship between the spacing of the tones in the two languages spoken by each speaker. [Work supported by NSF.]
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