F0 Contour Research Articles

The development of tone and intonation in Mandarin-speaking children—A pilot study

Mandarin is a tone language in which fundamental frequency (F0) is used to contrast lexical meaning and to convey intonation information. When tone and intonation interact, speakers maintain the shape of the F0 contour for word meaning contrasts but manipulate the magnitude of F0 change to meet intonation requirements. This pilot study provided a new perspective on tone acquisition by exploring phonetic characteristics of tone in different intonation contexts by Mandarin children who have acquired phonological contrasts. Three-, five- and eight-year-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and adults participated in this pilot study. Production of monosyllabic Tone 2 (rising F0) and Tone 4 (falling F0) words in isolation and in carrier sentences with interrogative (rising) and declarative (falling) intonation were elicited. Magnitude of F0 change, duration and intensity of the target words were acoustically measured and analyzed. Results suggested (1) a physiological basis of phonatory production where Tone 2 and falling intonation were produced more accurately; (2) lexical first strategy in the youngest children who prioritize tone accuracy over intonation accuracy; and (3) usage of developmentally appropriate and controllable acoustic cues first (e.g., Duration).Mandarin is a tone language in which fundamental frequency (F0) is used to contrast lexical meaning and to convey intonation information. When tone and intonation interact, speakers maintain the shape of the F0 contour for word meaning contrasts but manipulate the magnitude of F0 change to meet intonation requirements. This pilot study provided a new perspective on tone acquisition by exploring phonetic characteristics of tone in different intonation contexts by Mandarin children who have acquired phonological contrasts. Three-, five- and eight-year-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and adults participated in this pilot study. Production of monosyllabic Tone 2 (rising F0) and Tone 4 (falling F0) words in isolation and in carrier sentences with interrogative (rising) and declarative (falling) intonation were elicited. Magnitude of F0 change, duration and intensity of the target words were acoustically measured and analyzed. Results suggested (1) a physiological basis of phonatory production where ...

Intonational pitch features of interrogatives and declaratives in Chengdu dialect

As a representative of southwestern Mandarin, the Chengdu dialect has its own distinctive pitch features in phonology of tone and intonation. Research on the pronunciation and lexical tone of the Chengdu dialect has a long history with a certain amount of theoretical results. However, research on intonation of Chengdu dialect is still rare. The writer provides an acoustic analysis of research into intonational pitch features of interrogative and declarative sentences of Chengdu dialect, discussing the F0 contour at the final syllable (character) of each sentence to find out if the statement or question mood is carried by the edge tone as well as the pitch perturbation between lexical tone and intonation on it. The results of this acoustic analysis show that there exist statement and question mood of Chengdu dialect carried by the final syllable within an intonational phrase as well as the perturbation on the final syllable (character) by the coexistence of its lexical tone and intonation.

Vocal fold nodules: A disorder of phonation organs or auditory feedback?

Increasing evidence supports that auditory feedback of one's own voice closely relates to real-time adjustments of vocal control. Previous studies highlighted that the low-frequency modulations of below 3Hz (LFM) embedded in vocal fundamental frequency (F0) showed a reflex-like response to altered auditory inputs. However, the auditory feedback control of different vocal disorders remains unclear. A cross-sectional, case-controlled study. A tertiary medical centre. Sustained vocalisations of vowel/a/ from adult healthy controls and patients with vocal fold nodules, vocal fold polyps and vocal fold cysts, respectively. The vocalisations were made at a comfortable pitch and at the intensity of 70~80 dBC under the following four auditory conditions: natural hearing, 90-dBC speech noise, 10-dBC enhanced feedback of self-produced voice and both the noise and voice feedback. Power spectral analysis of F0 contour of sustained vowel. Patients with vocal fold nodules presented with different audio-vocal feedback behaviour and audio-vocal response to speech noise from the other two vocal pathologies of vocal fold polyp and vocal fold cyst as well as the healthy controls (P<.001, one-way ANOVA). The vocal fold nodules may be not only a vocal fold disease but also a disease caused by abnormal audio-vocal feedback. Moreover, the distinct audio-vocal feedback of vocal fold nodules could be revealed by power spectral analysis of vocal fundamental frequencies. Although further investigations are necessary, adjustments of audio-vocal feedback behaviour may provide a new insight and benefit to the treatment of vocal fold nodules in the future.

The effect of target/masker fundamental frequency contour similarity on masked-speech recognition.

Greater informational masking is observed when the target and masker speech are more perceptually similar. Fundamental frequency (f0) contour, or the dynamic movement of f0, is thought to provide cues for segregating target speech presented in a speech masker. Most of the data demonstrating this effect have been collected using digitally modified stimuli. Less work has been done exploring the role of f0 contour for speech-in-speech recognition when all of the stimuli have been produced naturally. The goal of this project was to explore the importance of target and masker f0 contour similarity by manipulating the speaking style of talkers producing the target and masker speech streams. Sentence recognition thresholds were evaluated for target and masker speech that was produced with either flat, normal, or exaggerated speaking styles; performance was also measured in speech spectrum shaped noise and for conditions in which the stimuli were processed through an ideal-binary mask. Results confirmed that similarities in f0 contour depth elevated speech-in-speech recognition thresholds; however, when the target and masker had similar contour depths, targets with normal f0 contours were more resistant to masking than targets with flat or exaggerated contours. Differences in energetic masking across stimuli cannot account for these results.

The effect of F0 contour on the intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese for hearing-impaired listeners.

Dynamic F0 contour plays an important role in recognizing speech. The present work examined the effect of F0 contour on speech intelligibility for hearing-impaired listeners for Mandarin Chinese in quiet, in steady noise, and in two-talker competing speech. The intelligibility of two types of natural speech was measured: single-Tone speech with relatively flat F0 contours and multi-Tone speech with time-varying F0 contours. The speech rate and mean F0 of speech materials were carefully controlled to avoid effects other than F0 contour on the speech intelligibility. Results showed that intelligibility was significantly higher for speech with a flat F0 contour than that with a dynamic F0 contour at a low signal-to-masker ratio in both speech-spectrum noise and two-talker masker.

Effects of affricate's aspiration on realization and perception of lexical tones in Standard Chinese.

Consonants in /CV/ (i.e., a consonant + a vowel) syllables usually have potential influence on onset fundamental frequency (i.e., onset f0) of the following vowel. Previous research on effects of consonant's aspiration on onset f0 has mainly considered the stops. This study investigates not only the effects of aspiration with evidence from affricates, but also the effects of different language speakers (Japanese vs Chinese), on the onset f0 of the following vowel. Through examining acoustic data of f0 realization and perception data of two physical continua of f0 contours, it is observed that the onset f0 following aspirated affricates was higher than that following unaspirated affricates, but the magnitudes of differences varied with tones. Perception data of two physical continua indicated that a tone carried by aspirated affricates (or unaspirated affricates) tended to be perceived as the tone which has relatively lower (or higher) onset f0. Both the realization and perception performance of Japanese speakers resembled that of Chinese speakers, which may further confirm the hypothesis that the f0 perturbation caused by aspiration belongs to phonemic processing instead of phonological processing.

The Effects of Modulating Fundamental Frequency and Speech Rate on the Intelligibility, Communication Efficiency, and Perceived Naturalness of Synthetic Speech.

Purpose This study investigated how modulating fundamental frequency (f0) and speech rate differentially impact the naturalness, intelligibility, and communication efficiency of synthetic speech. Method Sixteen sentences of varying prosodic content were developed via a speech synthesizer. The f0 contour and speech rate of these sentences were altered to produce 4 stimulus sets: (a) normal rate with a fixed f0 level, (b) slow rate with a fixed f0 level, (c) normal rate with prosodically natural f0 variation, and (d) normal rate with prosodically unnatural f0 variation. Sixteen listeners provided orthographic transcriptions and judgments of naturalness for these stimuli. Results Sentences with f0 variation were rated as more natural than those with a fixed f0 level. Conversely, sentences with a fixed f0 level demonstrated higher intelligibility than those with f0 variation. Speech rate did not affect the intelligibility of stimuli with a fixed f0 level. Communication efficiency was highest for sentences produced at a normal rate and a fixed f0 level. Conclusions Sentence-level f0 variation increased naturalness ratings of synthesized speech, whether the variation was prosodically natural or not. However, these f0 variations reduced intelligibility. There is evidence of a trade-off in naturalness and intelligibility of synthesized speech, which may impact future speech synthesis designs. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.8847833.

Brainstem encoding of frequency-modulated sweeps is relevant to Mandarin concurrent-vowels identification for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners

F0 contours convey the primary information of lexical Tones for Mandarin Chinese, and the processing of time-varying F0 contours is important for Mandarin concurrent-vowels identification (MCVI). In this work, we examined the relationship between frequency modulation (FM) detection of auditory system and MCVI in both normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. Three experiments were conducted with the same subjects to measure their MCVI, FM detection limen (FMDL), and frequency following responses (FFRs) evoked by FM sweeps, respectively. To ensure that F0 contour was the primary cue utilized, mean F0s and durations were equalized among all test vowels in the MCVI experiment. To simulate the pattern of F0 contours of Mandarin vowels, linearly FM sweeps were used as stimuli in the FMDL and FFRs experiments. The results confirmed that the performance of HI listeners was significantly worse than that of NH listeners in all of the three measurements. Besides, FFRs evoked by FM sweeps had significantly lower tracking accuracy than those evoked by steady tones only for HI listeners. The correlation analysis further revealed that any two of the three measured indices were significantly correlated when the effects of age and absolute threshold were partialed out (|r| ≥ 0.502, p ≤ 0.017). These results suggested an association between the poor performance of HI listeners in the MCVI task and their degraded auditory function on FM detection, and such a behavioral degradation has emerged in the phase-locking activity at the brainstem level.

Processing of Acoustic Information in Lexical Tone Production and Perception by Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients.

Purpose: This study examined the utilization of multiple types of acoustic information in lexical tone production and perception by pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients who are native speakers of Mandarin Chinese.Methods: Lexical tones were recorded from CI recipients and their peers with normal hearing (NH). Each participant was asked to produce a disyllabic word, yan jing, with which the first syllable was pronounced as Tone 3 (a low dipping tone) while the second syllable was pronounced as Tone 1 (a high level tone, meaning “eyes”) or as Tone 4 (a high falling tone, meaning “eyeglasses”). In addition, a parametric manipulation in fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of Tones 1 and 4 used in a lexical tone recognition task in Peng et al. (2017) was adopted to evaluate the perceptual reliance on each dimension.Results: Mixed-effect analyses of duration, intensity, and F0 cues revealed that NH children focused exclusively on marking distinct F0 contours, while CI participants shortened Tone 4 or prolonged Tone 1 to enhance their contrast. In line with these production strategies, NH children relied primarily on F0 cues to identify the two tones, whereas CI children showed greater reliance on duration cues. Moreover, CI participants who placed greater perceptual weight on duration cues also tended to exhibit smaller changes in their F0 production.Conclusion: Pediatric CI recipients appear to contrast the secondary acoustic dimension (duration) in addition to F0 contours for both lexical tone production and perception. These findings suggest that perception and production strategies of lexical tones are well coupled in this pediatric CI population.

Group Sparse Representation With WaveNet Vocoder Adaptation for Spectrum and Prosody Conversion

The statistical approach to voice conversion typically consists of a feature conversion module followed by a vocoder. So far, the feature conversion studies are mainly focused on the conversion of spectrum. However, speaker identity is also characterized by prosodic features, such as fundamental frequency F0 and energy contour among others. In this paper, we study the transformation of speaker characteristics both in terms of spectrum and prosody. We propose two novel techniques that effectively use a limited amount of source-target training data and leverage a large general speech corpus to improve the voice conversion quality. First, we study the phonetic sparse representation under the group sparsity mathematical formulation. We use phonetic posteriorgrams PPGs together with spectral and prosody features to form tandem feature in the phonetic dictionary. The tandem feature allow us to estimate an activation matrix that is less dependent on source speakers, thus providing a better voice conversion quality. Second, we study the use of WaveNet vocoder that can be trained on general speech corpus from multiple speakers and adapted on target speaker data to improve the vocoding quality. We benefit from the large general speech databases that are used to train the PPG generator, and the WaveNet vocoder. The experiments show that the proposed conversion framework outperforms the traditional spectrum and prosody conversion techniques in both objective and subjective evaluations.

Analyzing Nanjing Tones and Sandhi: Statistical Modelling Methods

In this study, we used growth curve analysis to model the surface f0 contours of the sandhi tones, and we also modelled the underlying pitch target of sandhi tones and their corresponding citation tones in Nanjing Chinese. The underlying pitch targets of reported sandhi tones showed neutralization with reported base tones in most cases, but the surface f0 contours of each pair were not neutralized. Our results provided acoustic evidence for the debate over the existence of some tone sandhi rules in Nanjing Chinese based on impressionistic data. Finally, transcription modification of some monosyllabic Nanjing Chinese tones was recommended based on the transformation of the results of the statistical modelling of the acoustic data.

The effects of amplitude and duration on the perception of English statements vs questions for native English and Chinese listeners.

The current study investigated whether amplitude and duration cues were salient for signaling English questions versus statements for native Mandarin Chinese listeners. The F0 contours of the final word were manipulated continuously from falling to rising patterns with the amplitude or duration varied. English-native and Chinese-native (EN and CN) listeners identified whether they heard a statement or a question. Results showed that the performance of EN listeners was influenced by the change of amplitude and duration in question-statement identification, while CN listeners' performance was not, suggesting possible differences of cue weighting between the two groups in distinguishing English sentence types.

Singing Proficiency of Members of a Choir Formed by Prelingually Deafened Children With Cochlear Implants.

PurposeA group of 10 prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants (CIs) formed a choir and received 21 months of formal music training. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the singing proficiency of these children.MethodThe participants included all choir members (7 girls and 3 boys, mean age of 9.5 years old) who were unilateral CI users. Meanwhile, 8 age-matched children with normal hearing were recruited as controls and were trained on 1 song for 2 weeks. Individual singing samples without instrument accompaniment were recorded from all participants. The singing samples were subject to acoustic analysis in which the fundamental frequency (F0) of each note was extracted and the duration was measured. Five metrics were developed and computed to quantify the accuracy of their pitch and rhythm performance. The 5 metrics included (a) percent correct of F0 contour direction of adjacent notes, (b) mean deviation of the normalized F0 across the notes, (c) mean deviation of the pitch intervals, (d) mean deviation of adjacent note duration ratio, and (e) mean absolute deviation of note duration.ResultsThe choir members with CIs demonstrated high accuracy in both pitch and tempo measures and performed on par with the children with normal hearing. Early start of music training after implantation and use of bimodal hearing contributed to the development of better music ability in these children with CIs.ConclusionThese findings indicated that rigorous music training could facilitate high singing proficiency in prelingually deafened children with CIs.

Just-noticeable differences of fundamental frequency change in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants

Fundamental frequency (F0) provides the primary acoustic cue for lexical tone perception in tonal languages but is poorly presented in cochlear implants (CIs). Currently, there is still a lack of understanding on the sensitivity to F0 information in CI users speaking tonal languages. In the present study, just-noticeable differences (JNDs) of F0 contour and F0 level change in Mandarin-speaking kindergarten-aged children with CIs were measured and compared with those in age-matched normal-hearing (NH) peers. Statistical analysis showed that both JND of F0 contour change (JND-C) and JND of F0 level change (JND-L) were significantly larger in CI group than in NH group. Furthermore, within-group comparison of JND-C and JND-L found that JND-C was significantly smaller than JND-L among children with CIs; however, opposite pattern was observed among children with normal hearing. The contrary sensitivity to F0 contour and F0 level change between children with CIs and children with normal hearing suggest discrepant mechanisms of F0 processing in these two groups as a result of hearing experience.Fundamental frequency (F0) provides the primary acoustic cue for lexical tone perception in tonal languages but is poorly presented in cochlear implants (CIs). Currently, there is still a lack of understanding on the sensitivity to F0 information in CI users speaking tonal languages. In the present study, just-noticeable differences (JNDs) of F0 contour and F0 level change in Mandarin-speaking kindergarten-aged children with CIs were measured and compared with those in age-matched normal-hearing (NH) peers. Statistical analysis showed that both JND of F0 contour change (JND-C) and JND of F0 level change (JND-L) were significantly larger in CI group than in NH group. Furthermore, within-group comparison of JND-C and JND-L found that JND-C was significantly smaller than JND-L among children with CIs; however, opposite pattern was observed among children with normal hearing. The contrary sensitivity to F0 contour and F0 level change between children with CIs and children with normal hearing suggest discrepan...

A harmonic-cancellation-based model to predict speech intelligibility against a harmonic masker

This study aimed at predicting speech intelligibility in the presence of harmonic maskers. Contrary to a noise signal, these maskers have a harmonic structure that allows for a segregation of the competing sounds based on a difference of their fundamental frequency (F0). This F0 segregation could be due to spectral glimpsing or harmonic cancellation. It is unclear what the relative contributions of these two mechanisms are. In this work, we have modified the model of Collin and Lavandier [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 134, 1146–1159 (2013)] in order to take into account both mechanisms. Different implementations of the model were compared and applied to two data sets: SRTs measured for monotonous harmonic maskers that varied in their F0s and degree of harmonicity; SRTs measured for monotonous and intonated harmonic maskers that varied in their mean F0, F0 contour, temporal envelope and spatial position. Comparison of data and model predictions will allow us to establish how to implement harmonic cancellation in our model framework, to evaluate to what extent the model can predict F0 segregation for harmonic maskers, and to determine the relative roles of spectral glimpsing and harmonic cancellation suggested by the model.

Relative influences of information structure and utterance-final position on the prosodic implementation of nuclear pitch accents

The phonological and phonetic realization of a nuclear pitch accent has been claimed to reflect aspects of its information structure (IS). As the rightmost accented word in an intonational phrase, the nuclear pitch accent often co-occurs with utterance-final position, which in American English, is often cued by prosodic means such as creaky voice and domain-final lengthening. The present study investigated the relative influence of IS and utterance-final position on the prosodic implementation of words in nuclear position. The IS of an object noun phrase occurring in nuclear position was manipulated to be given, accessible, new, or contrastive relative to a parallel object noun in the preceding sentence. The critical object noun occurred in utterance-final position in experiment 1 and in non-final position and preceding a semantically vacuous syntactic phrase in experiment 2 (e.g., “that was there,” “for it). Given that contrastive information significantly influenced the prosodic implementation of the object noun in both experiments with respective reduction and enhancement effects, but utterance-final position nevertheless regulated the particular phonetic instantiation. While IS modulated the degree of creakiness, duration, and intensity in final position, IS conditions in non-final nuclear position modulated the type of f0 contour and duration.

Identification of diseases in newborns using advanced acoustic features of cry signals

Our challenge in the current study is to extend research on the cries of newborns for the early diagnosis of different pathologies. This paper proposes a recognition system for healthy and pathological cries using a probabilistic neural network classifier. Two different kinds of features have been used to characterize newborn cry signals: 1) acoustic features such as fundamental frequency glide (F0glide) and resonance frequencies dysregulation (RFsdys); 2) conventional features such as mel-frequency cestrum coefficients.This paper describes the automatic estimation of the proposed characteristics and the performance evaluation of these features in identifying pathological cries. The adopted methods for F0glides and RFsdys estimation are based on the derived function of the F0 contour and the jump "J" of the RFs between two subsequent tunings, respectively. The database used contains 3250 cry samples of full-term and preterm newborns, and includes healthy and pathologic cries.The obtained results indicate the important association between the quantified features and some studied pathologies, and also an improvement in the identification of pathologic cries. The best result obtained is 88.71% for the correct identification of health status of preterm newborns, and 82% for the correct identification of full-term infants with a specific disease. We conclude that using the proposed characteristics improves the diagnosis of pathologies in newborns. Moreover, the method applied in the estimation of these characteristics allows us to extend this study to other uninvestigated pathologies.

Effect of F0 contour on perception of Mandarin Chinese speech against masking.

Intonation has many perceptually significant functions in language that contribute to speech recognition. This study aims to investigate whether intonation cues affect the unmasking of Mandarin Chinese speech in the presence of interfering sounds. Specifically, intelligibility of multi-tone Mandarin Chinese sentences with maskers consisting of either two-talker speech or steady-state noise was measured in three (flattened, typical, and exaggerated) intonation conditions. Different from most of the previous studies, the present study only manipulate and modify the intonation information but preserve tone information. The results showed that recognition of the final keywords in multi-tone Mandarin Chinese sentences was much better under the original F0 contour condition than the decreased F0 contour or exaggerated F0 contour conditions whenever there was a noise or speech masker, and an exaggerated F0 contour reduced the intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese more under the speech masker condition than that under the noise masker condition. These results suggested that speech in a tone language (Mandarin Chinese) is harder to understand when the intonation is unnatural, even if the tone information is preserved, and an unnatural intonation contour decreases releasing Mandarin Chinese speech from masking, especially in a multi-person talking environment.

Contributos do estudo sobre o desgarramento na língua falada para a descrição do fraseamento prosódico no Português Brasileiro

O desgarramento foi postulado por Decat (1999, 2011), com base numa análise funcional-discursiva, afirmando que algumas orações entre as tradicionalmente chamadas de ‘subordinadas’ pela tradição gramatical podem ocorrer soltas ou sozinhas. Instigado pelo fenômeno, este artigo realiza uma descrição prosódica de orações desgarradas e correlaciona-a a reflexões referentes aos fraseamento prosódico no Português do Brasil. Para isso, leva em conta resultados de Tenani (2002) e Serra (2009), concernentes à estrutura entoacional de orações adverbiais e aos correlatos acústicos do fraseamento no PB, respectivamente, que revelam ser o contorno entoacional L+H*H% relativo a sintagmas entoacionaisn (IPs) hierarquizados e a pausa ser a pista mais robusta no fraseamento de IPs. Foram analisados os parâmetros acústicos duração, pausa e contorno de F0 em 900 orações adverbais – 450 anexadas à oração matriz e outras 450 lexicalmente idênticas, desgarradas, produzidas por cinco informantes oriundas do estado Rio de Janeiro. Os resultados demonstram que a maioria das orações adverbiais produzidas em conjunto com a oração matriz foram delimitadas por contornos melódicos com fronteira baixa (72,7% dos dados - 38,5% de L+H*L% e 34,2% de H+L*L%), ao passo que o contorno L+H*H% esteve presente em 27,3% delas. No que se refere às orações desgarradas, completas, o contorno L+H*H% foi majoritariamente produzido (83,5%). Com isso, postula-se que o contorno L+H*H%, referido como “continuativo” na literatura de base prosódica (Gonçalves 1997; Cunha, 2000; Tenani 2002) só traria a ideia de continuidade quando o IP for fraseado sem a saliência de outra pista prosódica.

Microtonal Variation in Sung Cantonese

Background/Aims: Both music and language impose constraints on fundamental frequency (F0) in sung music. Composers are known to set words of tone languages to music in a way that reflects tone height but fails to include tone contour. This study tests whether choral singers add linguistic tone contour information to an unfamiliar song by examining whether Cantonese singers make use of microtonal variation. Methods: 12 native Cantonese-speaking non-professional choral singers learned and sang a novel song in Cantonese which included a minimal set of the Cantonese tones to probe whether everyday singers add in missing contour information. Results: Cantonese singers add in a rising F0 contour of less than a semitone when singing syllables with lexical rising tones. This microtonal variation is not observed when singing in a lower register. Conclusion: Cantonese singers use microtonal contours to reflect rising contours of Cantonese linguistic tones.