Tonal Errors Research Articles

Classical guitar intonation and compensation: The well-tempered guitar.

An intuitive model of classical guitar intonation is presented that includes the effects of the resonant length of the fretted string, linear mass density, tension, and bending stiffness. An expression is derived for the vibration frequencies of a stiff string using asymmetric boundary conditions at the saddle and the fret. Based on logarithmic frequency differences ("cents") that decouple these physical effects, Taylor series expansions are introduced that exhibit clearly the origins of frequency deviations of fretted notes from the corresponding 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET) values. A simple in situ technique is demonstrated for measurement of the changes in frequency of open strings arising from small adjustments in length, and a simple procedure is proposed that any interested guitarist can use to estimate the corresponding frequency shifts due to tension and bending stiffness for their own guitars and string sets. Based on these results, a least-squares fit method is employed to select values of saddle and nut setbacks that map fretted frequencies-for a particular string set and guitar-almost perfectly onto their 12-TET targets. A general approach to tempering an "off-the-shelf" guitar is shown to further reduce the tonal errors inherent in any fretted musical instrument.

Analysis of errors in Mandarin disyllabic tones produced by Vietnamese speakers

Abstract This study investigates the tone production of Mandarin disyllabic words by Vietnamese speakers. It aims to provide insights into the challenges Vietnamese speakers face when producing Mandarin tones in disyllabic words. In the study, there were 30 Vietnamese L2 learners of Mandarin, who were requested to produce 80 (4 tones × 4 tones × 5 words of each tonal combination) disyllabic words in Mandarin. The overall results showed that Tone 4 was the most difficult among the four lexical tones. In the first syllable, most errors were found for Tone 3 when followed by another Tone 3 (where the first Tone 3 should be pronounced as a rising tone, similar to Tone 2, but mispronounced as Tone 3), which indicated that Vietnamese speakers tend to underapply Mandarin third tone sandhi. In the second syllable, most errors were found for Tone 4 when preceded by Tone 4 (the second Tone 4 mispronounced as Tone 1). The findings can help explore how L2 production models can account for L2 production of Mandarin tones by considering effects of phonetic/phonological nature of Mandarin lexical tones as well as the interference arising from the L1 phonology of learners.

Statistical Information Affects Spoken Word Recognition of Tone Languages in Stutterers: Evidence From an Auditory-Perceptual Gating Study.

Previous studies have shown that individuals who stutter exhibit abnormal speech perception in addition to disfluent production as compared with their nonstuttering peers. This study investigated whether adult Chinese-speaking stutterers are still able to use knowledge of statistical regularities embedded in their native language to recognize spoken words and, if so, how much acoustic information is needed to trigger this information. Seventeen stutterers and 20 typical, nonstuttering controls participated in a gating experiment. All participants listened to monosyllabic words that consisted of syllables and lexical tones and were segmented into eight successive gates. These words differed in syllable token frequency and syllable-tone co-occurrence probability in line with a Chinese spoken word corpus. The correct syllable-only, correct tone-only, correct syllable-tone word, and correct syllable-incorrect tone responses were analyzed between the two groups using mixed-effects models. Stutterers were less accurate overall than controls, with fewer correct syllables, tones, and their combination as words. However, stutterers showed consistent and reliable perceptual patterns triggered by statistical information of speech, as reflected by more accurate responses to high-frequency syllables, high-probability tones, and tone errors all in manners similar to those of nonstuttering controls. Stutterers' atypical speech perception is not due to a lack of statistical learning. Stutterers were able to perceive spoken words with phonological tones based on statistical regularities embedded in their native speech. This finding echoes previous production studies of stuttering and lends some support for a link between perception and production. Implications of pathological, diagnostic, and therapeutic conditions of stuttering are discussed.

Kajian Fonetik Bunyi Vokal Tunggal Bahasa Mandarin

This study aimed at describing the characteristics and differences in the Mandarin vowel sounds. This study involved a Chinese lecturer and two students of Mandarin Language Education FKIP Untan as research samples. The research data was in forms of Mandarin vocabulary which contains a single vowel. The PRAAT application was used to calculate the time, frequency, and intensity of the research object when uttering single vowel words. This study used experimental phonetics as a research method and presented the data in forms of tables and spectrogram images. The data retrieval method is through the PRAAT program with audio files (MP3). The study results show that pronunciation of a single vowel sound /o/ with the longest duration value from students and native speakers. The highest pitch value for native speakers is 315 Hz in single vowel /i/ and the highest pitch value for students when pronouncing words with single vowel /o/, with a voice frequency of 279.5 Hz. The highest native intensity value is for single vowel /ε/ with a value of 79.92 dB, single vowel /o/ is 79.96 dB for student speakers. The influence of tone errors is one factor that affects the resulting duration, pitch, and intensity values.

An Experimental Study of Chinese Disyllabic Tone Errors in Native French Speakers and an Investigation of Online Teaching Strategies

In the learning of Chinese as a second language, phonetic learning serves as the basis of the whole learning process, among which the learning of Chinese tones is of paramount importance. In this regard, this paper aims to explore the pronunciation of Chinese tones by native French speakers in the target language environment. First, through the experimental analysis as well as the recording of the tones of native French speakers, this paper selects a total of 237 disyllabic words, with a total of four combinations determined except for the combination of the same disyllabic neutral tone in the target language environment. Meanwhile, this paper utilizes PRAAT software to acquire the average frequency of tone sampling points, whereby the tone-pattern error of each tone combination can be clarified. Secondly, by comparing and analyzing the foregoing results with the tone patterns of Chinese students, this paper further finds out the tone-pattern errors of the same tone combination in disyllabic words, thus summarizing the corresponding error rules. Through the above experimental analysis, this paper concludes that the combination of Tone 3 and Tone 3 presents the highest pronunciation error rate, followed by the combination of Tone 2 and Tone 2. In addition, this paper reveals that the tone error is the main tone error and that there are also duration errors. Lastly, combined with the specific reasons for the errors, this paper proposes targeted online teaching strategies suitable for international Chinese education.

简析中级汉语水平少数民族学生学习现代汉语声调的偏误——以新疆艺术学院附属中专为例

简析中级汉语水平少数民族学生学习现代汉语声调的偏误——以新疆艺术学院附属中专为例

Atypical patterns of tone production in tone-language-speaking children with autism.

Speakers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are found to exhibit atypical pitch patterns in speech production. However, little is known about the production of lexical tones (T1, T2, T3, T4) as well as neutral tones (T1N, T2N, T3N, T4N) by tone-language speakers with ASD. Thus, this study investigated the height and shape of tones produced by Mandarin-speaking children with ASD and their age-matched typically developing (TD) peers. A pronunciation experiment was conducted in which the participants were asked to produce reduplicated nouns. The findings from the acoustic analyses showed that although ASD children generally produced both lexical tones and neutral tones with distinct tonal contours, there were significant differences between the ASD and TD groups for tone height and shape for T1/T1N, T3/T3N, and T4/T4N. However, we did not find any difference in T2/T2N. These data implied that the atypical acoustic pattern in the ASD group could be partially due to the suppression of the F0 range. Moreover, we found that ASD children tended to produce more errors for T2/T2N, T3/T3N than for T1/T1N, T4/T4N. The pattern of tone errors could be explained by the acquisition principle of pitch, similarities among different tones, and tone sandhi. We thus concluded that deficits in pitch processing could be responsible for the atypical tone pattern of ASD children, and speculated that the atypical tonal contours might also be due to imitation deficits. The present findings may eventually help enhance the comprehensive understanding of the representation of atypical pitch patterns in ASD across languages.

The Use of Segmental and Suprasegmental Sequencing Skills to Differentiate Children With and Without Childhood Apraxia of Speech: Protocol for a Comparative Accuracy Study.

BackgroundChildhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a motor-based speech sound disorder (SSD) with a core impairment in the planning and programming of spatiotemporal parameters of speech movement sequences. CAS may cause deficits in both segmental and suprasegmental components of speech, and it can severely affect children’s ability to speak intelligibly and communicate effectively and impact their quality of life. Assessment tasks, such as the maximum performance tasks (MPT) and Syllable Repetition Task (SRT), examine children’s segmental sequencing skills to assist with the diagnosis of CAS. In Hong Kong, although the MPT and SRT have been used clinically to diagnose CAS in Cantonese-speaking children, their validity has not been reported. There is an urgent need for such investigations. Suprasegmentally, lexical stress errors have been reported as a consensual feature and to aid in the diagnosis of CAS. However, there are challenges in diagnosing CAS in children who speak tonal languages like Cantonese. A recent study has reported lexical tone errors in Cantonese-speaking children with CAS. Furthermore, deficits in pitch-variation skills were found in Cantonese-speaking children with CAS using a tone sequencing task (TST). It is hypothesized that there is a universal deficit in pitch-variation skills among tonal and nontonal language speakers with CAS. Further investigations of pitch-variation skills using the TST in Cantonese-speaking children with CAS may shed light on suprasegmental deficits in tonal languages and contribute to the development of a valid diagnostic tool for CAS in children who speak other tonal languages, such as Vietnamese, Thai, and Mandarin.ObjectiveThis study aims to examine the diagnostic potential of the MPT, SRT, and TST in diagnosing Cantonese-speaking children with CAS and to investigate pitch-variation skills in Cantonese-speaking children with and without CAS.MethodsA total of 25 children with CAS and 3 groups of age- and gender-matched controls (non-CAS SSD only group, non-CAS SSD co-occurring with language impairment group, and typical development group) will be recruited. All participants will perform the MPT, SRT, and TST measures. Their performances on these tools will be perceptually judged and acoustically measured.ResultsData collection will last from January 1, 2022, to October 30, 2023. As of August 2022, the project has recruited 4 children in the CAS group, 21 children in the non-CAS SSD group, 4 children in the speech and language impairment group, and 53 children in the typical development group.ConclusionsIt is anticipated that Cantonese-speaking children with CAS will have poorer pitch-variation skills than the control groups and that the MPT, SRT, and TST will be appropriate diagnostic tools for identifying CAS in Cantonese-speaking children. The project will benefit the field of speech-language pathology locally and internationally, with short- and long-term impacts.International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)DERR1-10.2196/40465

Individuals With Congenital Amusia Show Degraded Speech Perception but Preserved Statistical Learning for Tone Languages.

Individuals with congenital amusia exhibit degraded speech perception. This study examined whether adult Chinese Mandarin listeners with amusia were still able to extract the statistical regularities of Mandarin speech sounds, despite their degraded speech perception. Using the gating paradigm with monosyllabic syllable-tone words, we tested 19 Mandarin-speaking amusics and 19 musically intact controls. Listeners heard increasingly longer fragments of the acoustic signal across eight duration-blocked gates. The stimuli varied in syllable token frequency and syllable-tone co-occurrence probability. The correct syllable-tone word, correct syllable-only, correct tone-only, and correct syllable-incorrect tone responses were compared respectively between the two groups using mixed-effects models. Amusics were less accurate than controls in terms of the correct word, correct syllable-only, and correct tone-only responses. Amusics, however, showed consistent patterns of top-down processing, as indicated by more accurate responses to high-frequency syllables, high-probability tones, and tone errors all in manners similar to those of the control listeners. Amusics are able to learn syllable and tone statistical regularities from the language input. This extends previous work by showing that amusics can track phonological segment and pitch cues despite their degraded speech perception. The observed speech deficits in amusics are therefore not due to an abnormal statistical learning mechanism. These results support rehabilitation programs aimed at improving amusics' sensitivity to pitch.

Hong Kong Cantonese university students’ tonal errors in Mandarin and their relation to L1 influence

Abstract After the change of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to People’s Republic of China, Mandarin has become increasingly important in Hong Kong society. However, it is observed that many native Cantonese speakers have problems mastering Mandarin tones despite the less complex tonal system. This study attempts to investigate the Mandarin tonal error patterns made by Hong Kong learners and the possible causes for these errors. A reading aloud test and a follow-up interview were designed to collect the data. The findings of the study show that a large number of students were confused about Mandarin tones and found them difficult to master, especially between tone 1 and tone 4 and tone 2 and tone 3. All the participants made these two mistakes in the test. This study hypothesizes that L1 negative transfer is the key factor that helps Cantonese speaking learners’ ability to establish a new tone in the L2. However, the reason for participants’ tonal mistakes is not due to one single cause; instead, the errors are caused by multiple factors, including lack of tonal knowledge, incomplete tonal acquisition, and tonal errors explained by the Speech Learning Model.

Behavioral and Neural Responses to Tone Errors in Foreign‐Accented Mandarin

AbstractPrevious event‐related potentials (ERP) research has investigated how foreign accent modulates listeners’ neural responses to lexical‐semantic and morphosyntactic errors. We extended this line of research to consider whether pronunciation errors in Mandarin Chinese are processed differently when a foreign‐accented speaker makes them relative to when a native‐accented speaker makes them (a conceptual replication using the materials from Pelzl et al., 2019). We evaluated behavioral judgments, the N400, and late positive component while native speakers listened to native and foreign‐accented sentences containing tone and rhyme pronunciation errors. We observed effects that suggested that the participants were prone to detect errors in foreign‐accented speech more often in sentences with no critical word deviation but also were less likely to reject critical tone errors produced by the foreign‐accented speaker. ERP results showed a main effect of accent on late positive components that suggested a difference in degree for sensitivity to foreign‐accented compared to native‐accented pronunciation errors rather than a completely different response pattern. We found no effect of accent on N400s, with statistically significant differences between tone and rhyme errors regardless of speaker accent.

Tuning out tone errors? Native listeners do not down-weight tones when hearing unsystematic tone errors in foreign-accented Mandarin

AbstractListeners can adapt to errors in foreign-accented speech, but not all errors are alike. We investigated whether exposure to unsystematic tone errors in second language Mandarin impacts responses to accurately produced words. Native Mandarin speakers completed a cross-modal priming task with words produced by foreign-accented talkers who either produced consistently correct tones, or frequent tone errors. Facilitation from primes bearing correct tones was unaffected by the presence of tone errors elsewhere in the talker's speech. However, primes bearing tone errors inhibited recognition of real words and elicited stronger accentedness ratings. We consider theoretical implications for tone in foreign-accent adaptation.

Optimizing the Spectral Characterisation of a CMYK Printer with Embedded CMY Printer Modelling

In the digital printing process, reliable colour reproduction is commonly achieved by printer characterisation, which defines the correspondence between the input device control values and the output colour information. The cellular Yule–Nielsen spectral Neugebauer model, together with its variants, is widely adopted in this topic because of its superb colorimetric and spectral accuracy. However, it seems that current studies have neglected an inconspicuous defect in such models when characterising printers equipped with black ink. That is, the cellular structure of these models overemphasises the sampling for dark-tone colours, and thus leads to relatively large errors in light tones. In this paper, taking a CMYK printer as an example, a simple and effective solution is proposed with no need of extra sampling. With the aid of a newly built cellular spectral Neugebauer model for the embedded CMY printer, this approach optimises the printer characterisation for light tones, slightly improves the precision for middle tones while it maintains the accuracy for dark tones. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated with regard to three different kinds of substrates and the experimental results validated its improvement in spectral printer characterisation.

Tone slips in Cantonese: Evidence for early phonological encoding

This article examines speech errors in Cantonese with the aim of fleshing out a larger speech production architecture for encoding phonological tone. A corpus was created by extracting 2462 speech errors, including 668 tone errors, from audio recordings of natural conversations. The structure of these errors was then investigated in order to distinguish two contemporary approaches to tone in speech production. In the tonal frames account, tone is encoded like metrical stress, represented in abstract structural frames for a word. Because tone cannot be mis-selected in tonal frames, tone errors are expected to be rare and non-contextual, as observed with stress. An alternative is that tone is actively selected in phonological encoding like phonological segments. This approach predicts that tone errors will be relatively common and exhibit the contextual patterns observed with segments, like perseveration and anticipation. In our corpus, tone errors are the second most common type of error, and the majority of errors exhibit contextual patterns that parallel segmental errors. Building on prior research, a two-stage model of phonological tone encoding is proposed, following the patterns seen in tone errors: Tone is phonologically selected concurrently with segments, but then sequentially assigned after segments to a syllable.

對漢語聲調敎學的深層思考

Tone error is a phenomenon that the most frequently occurs to Chinese learners and its range of being influenced is very wide. However, it rather shows that tone is not regarded to be the most difficult to learners. Obviously, it is learners

The effect of L1 tonal status on the acquisition of L2 Mandarin tones

This study examines the second language (L2) Mandarin tone acquisition by two tonal groups of learners (Thai and Yoruba speakers). In the study, the two groups of learners read a passage and the tones in their readings were analyzed. The analysis of the tone productions focused on tone error patterns and locations that tone errors occurred. The analysis of tone errors showed that overall the Thai learners produced L2 Mandarin tones better than the Yoruba learners, due to their larger tone inventory size and/or tonal similarity with Mandarin tones. Another finding in this study is that the two learner groups shared some similar patterns in their L2 tone production, arguably due to the L2 learners' tendency to place narrow focus at the PW‐initial position.

Improving Mandarin Tone Recognition Based on DNN by Combining Acoustic and Articulatory Features Using Extended Recognition Networks

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of articulatory information for Mandarin tone modeling and recognition in a deep neural network – hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM) framework. In conventional approaches, prosodic evidence (e.g., F0, duration and energy) is used to build tone classifiers, we here propose performance enhancement techniques in three areas: (i) adding articulatory features (AFs) and acoustic features, such as MFCCs (Mel frequency cepstrum coefficients), for tone modeling; (ii) adopting phone-dependent tone modeling; and (iii) using tone-based extended recognition network (ERN) to reduce the tone search space. The first approach is feature-related, it explicitly employs the AFs as a form of tonal features and is implemented through a multi-stage procedure. The second approach is model-related and directly extends to phone-dependent tone modeling so that each modeling unit (e.g., tonal phone) not only contains tone information, but also integrates the phone/articulatory information. Finally, the third technique is search-related with a phone-dependent tone-based expanding searching network. A series of comprehensive experiments is conducted using different input feature sets. It is demonstrated that (i) tone recognition accuracy is boosted by incorporating articulatory information, and (ii) ERN, attains the lowest tone error rate of 7.17%, with a 56% relative error reduction from the prosody-only baseline system error of 16.36%.

Phonetic complexity affects children's Mandarin tone production accuracy in disyllabic words: A perceptual study.

This is the first study to examine the effect of phonetic contexts on children’s lexical tone production. Mandarin tones in disyllabic words produced by forty-four 2- to 6-year-old children and twelve mothers were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Native Mandarin-speaking adults categorized the tones based on the pitch information in the filtered stimuli. All mothers’ tones were categorized with ceiling accuracy. Counter to the findings in most previous studies on children’s tone acquisition and the prevailing assumption in models of speech development that children acquire suprasegmental features much earlier than segmental features, this study found that children as old as six years of age have not mastered the production of Mandarin tones. Children’s tones were judged with significantly lower accuracy than mothers’ productions. Tone accuracy improved, while cross subject variability in tone accuracy decreased, with age. Children’s tone accuracy was affected by the articulatory complexity of phonetic contexts. Children made more errors in tone combinations with more complex fundamental frequency (F0) contours than tone sequences with simpler F0 changes. When producing disyllabic tone sequences with complex F0 contours, children tended to shift the F0 contour of the first tone to reduce the F0 change, resulting in more tone errors in the first syllable than in the second syllable and showing substantially more anticipatory coarticulation than adults. The results provide further evidence that acquisition of lexical tones is a protracted process in children. Tones produced accurately by children in one phonetic context may not be produced correctly in another phonetic context. Children demonstrate more anticipatory coarticulation in their disyllabic productions than adults, which may be attributed to children’s immature speech motor control in tone production, and is presumably a by-product of their inability to accomplish complex F0 changes within the syllable time-frame.

Large-scale characterization of non-native Mandarin Chinese spoken by speakers of European origin: Analysis on iCALL

In this work, we analyze phonetic and prosodic pronunciation patterns from iCALL, a speech corpus designed to evaluate Mandarin mispronunciations by non-native speakers of European origin and to address the lack of large-scale, non-native corpora with comprehensive annotations for applications in CAPT (computer-assisted pronunciation training). iCALL consists of 90,841 utterances from 305 speakers with a total duration of 142 hours. The speakers are from diverse linguistic backgrounds (spanning Germanic, Romance, and Slavic native languages). The read utterances are phonetically balanced with phonetic, tonal, and fluency annotations. Our findings on iCALL reveal that lexical tone errors are over six times more prevalent than phonetic errors, French speakers are twice as likely to mispronounce Tone 2, 3, 4 when compared to English speakers, native Romance language speakers are more likely to make de-aspiration and aspiration mistakes, and fluency scores correlate inversely with tone and phone error rate.

Tone errors in scripted conversations of L2 Mandarin Chinese

AbstractThis study examines the acquisition of Mandarin tones by American English speaking second language (L2) learners. Three types of tone sequences, namely, compatible tone sequences, conflicting tone sequences, and other tone sequences, were used. The analysis of tone errors in different tone sequences showed that, while learners seemed to have acquired the Tone 3 and its sandhi, they tended to over-apply the sandhi rule in inappropriate contexts and produced tone errors. More importantly, the low and rising tones, which are generally difficult for L2 learners to produce, were the most frequent tones produced to replace other tones. More specifically, the low tone errors tended to occur at the phrase-medial position, while the rising tone errors tended to occur at the phrase-initial position. The low and rising tone errors were attributed to the difficulty in quickly changing tone targets and F0 direction in tone production, which is the product of the superimposition of English prosody.