Tonal Contrast Research Articles

Lexical tone and stuttering in Cantonese

ABSTRACTCantonese is a tone language, in which the variation of the fundamental frequency contour of a syllable can change meaning. There are six different lexical tones in Cantonese. While research with Western languages has shown an association between stuttering and syllabic stress, nothing is known about whether stuttering in Cantonese speakers is associated with one or more of the six lexical tones. Such an association has been reported in conversational speech in Mandarin, which is also a tone language, but which varies markedly from Cantonese. Twenty-four native Cantonese-speaking adults who stutter participated in this study, ranging in age from 18–33 years. There were 18 men and 6 women. Participants read aloud 13 Cantonese syllables, each of which was produced with six contrastive lexical tones. All 78 syllables were embedded in the same carrier sentence, to reduce the influence of suprasegmental or linguistic stress, and were presented in random order. No significant differences were found for stuttering moments across the six lexical tones. It is suggested that this is because lexical tones, at least in Cantonese, do not place the task demands on the speech motor system that typify varying syllabic stress in Western languages: variations not only in fundamental frequency, but also in duration and intensity. The findings of this study suggest that treatments for adults who stutter in Western languages, such as speech restructuring, can be used with Cantonese speakers without undue attention to lexical tone.

The Effect of Implied Performer Age and Group Membership on Evaluations of Music Performances

This study examined the effects of implied performer age and group membership on listeners’ evaluations of music performances. Undergraduate music majors ( n = 23), nonmusic majors ( n = 17), and members of a New Horizons ensemble ( n = 16) were presented with six 30-second excerpts of concert band performances. Excerpts were presented to all respondents in three implied performer age conditions: audio-only (no implied age), audiovisual presentations that featured digital images of middle school concert bands, and audiovisual presentations that featured digital images of older adult concert bands. Respondents ( N = 56) used 10-point scales to rate each performance on tone, rhythmic precision, and dynamic contrast. Results of a repeated-measures analysis of variance indicated that audio-only presentations were rated significantly lower than audiovisual presentations, and music majors rated performances significantly lower than other respondents.

Statistical learning of speech sounds is most robust during the period of perceptual attunement

Although statistical learning has been shown to be a domain-general mechanism, its constraints, such as its interactions with perceptual development, are less well understood and discussed. This study is among the first to investigate the distributional learning of lexical pitch in non-tone-language-learning infants, exploring its interaction with language-specific perceptual attunement during the first 2years after birth. A total of 88 normally developing Dutch infants of 5, 11, and 14months were tested via a distributional learning paradigm and were familiarized on a unimodal or bimodal distribution of high-level versus high-falling tones in Mandarin Chinese. After familiarization, they were tested on a tonal contrast that shared equal distributional information in either modality. At 5months, infants in both conditions discriminated the contrast, whereas 11-month-olds showed discrimination only in the bimodal condition. By 14months, infants failed to discriminate the contrast in either condition. Results indicate interplay between infants' long-term linguistic experience throughout development and short-term distributional learning during the experiment, and they suggest that the influence of tonal distributional learning varies along the perceptual attunement trajectory, such that opportunities for distributional learning effects appear to be constrained in the beginning and at the end of perceptual attunement. The current study contributes to previous research by demonstrating an effect of age on learning from distributional cues.

Perception of the Lexical Accent Contrast in One Variety of East Norwegian.

The perception of the lexical pitch accents was examined in the Trøndersk dialect of Norwegian. Based on a production study, a categorization of stimuli with manipulated pitch contours was conducted. The experiment tested which acoustic cues (height and alignment of fundamental frequency (F0) minimum, and alignment of F0 maximum and turning point from maximum to minimum) are necessary for the perception of the tonal contrast. The results are consistent with the production findings in that changes in all of the examined acoustic cues contributed to the shift in accent categorization. The later alignment of the main F0 landmarks (F0 maximum, F0 minimum and turning point from maximum to minimum) induced accent 2 identification. Raising F0 minimum height also led to more accent 2 responses. The analysis of the perception patterns furthermore revealed that the effect of a later alignment of F0 minimum was weak unless combined with a later alignment of the other F0 landmarks, or a higher F0 minimum level, all of which contributed to more accent 2 responses. These results indicate that accent 1 is characterized by an early fall, and accent 2 by a salient initial high tone. Implications of these findings for the phonological analysis of the tonal contrasts in the Trøndersk dialect are also discussed.

Perception of Similar and Dissimilar Lexical Tones by Non‐Tone‐Learning Infants

This study examined the perception of Mandarin lexical tones by non‐tone‐learning infants. We tested French‐learning 4‐, 8‐, and 11‐month‐olds on Tone 2 (rising) versus Tone 3 (dipping), the most acoustically similar contrast in Mandarin, and on Tone 1 (high) versus Tone 4 (falling), acoustically more dissimilar contrast. We hypothesized that sensitivity should decline with age for the similar contrast, and the dissimilar contrast should remain more discriminable. Infants were habituated to one tone and tested with the same tone versus the contrastive tone. Results showed that the dissimilar T1–T4 contrast was consistently discriminated by all three ages, whereas the discrimination of the similar T2–T3 contrast revealed a tendency to decline over the ages. These results suggest that relative to consonants and vowels, perceptual sensitivity to lexical tones remains stronger in non‐tone‐learning infants. Discrimination of lexical tones is affected by both acoustic salience and perceptual attunement to the native‐language phonology.

Perceptual Improvement of Lexical Tones in Infants: Effects of Tone Language Experience.

To learn words in a tonal language, tone-language learners should not only develop better abilities for perceiving consonants and vowels, but also for lexical tones. The divergent trend of enhancing sensitivity to native phonetic contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrast is theoretically essential to evaluate effects of listening to an ambient language on speech perception development. The loss of sensitivity in discriminating lexical tones among non-tonal language-learning infants was apparent between 6 and 12 months of age, but only few studies examined trends of differentiating native lexical tones in infancy. The sensitivity in discriminating lexical tones among 6–8 and 10–12 month-old Mandarin-learning infants (n = 120) was tested in Experiment 1 using three lexical tone contrasts of Mandarin. Facilitation of linguistic experience was shown in the tonal contrast (Tone 1 vs. 3), but both age groups performed similar in the other two tonal contrasts (Tone 2 vs. 4; Tone 2 vs. 3). In Experiment 2, 6–8 and 10–12 month-old Mandarin-learning infants (n = 90) were tested with tonal contrasts that have pitch contours either similar to or inverse from lexical tones in Mandarin, and perceptual improvement was shown only in a tonal contrast with familiar pitch contours (i.e., Tone 1 vs. 3). In Experiment 3, 6–8 and 10–12 month-old English-learning infants (n = 40) were tested with Tone 1 vs. 3 contrast of Mandarin and showed an improvement in the perception of non-native lexical tones. This study reveals that tone-language learning infants develop more accurate representations of lexical tones around their first birthday, and the results of both tone and non-tone language-learning infants imply that the rate of development depends on listening experience and the acoustical salience of specific tone contrasts.

Local and Global Cues in the Prosodic Realization of Broad and Narrow Focus in Bulgarian

In this study, local and global prosodic cues for information structure are examined in the elicited production of six Bulgarian sentences. The sentences were produced in response to different questions, devised to prompt different focus realizations (broad focus and non-contrastive and contrastive narrow focus). Results show that speakers consistently differentiate broad and narrow focus by means of both local and global acoustic cues, by producing different pitch accent types on the nuclear syllable and reducing the ‘phonetic strength' of the default pre-nuclear accent in the narrow focus condition. Thus, the difference between the acoustic properties of the nuclear and the pre-nuclear accented syllables is smaller in the broad focus condition and greater in the narrow focus condition. Contrastive and non-contrastive narrow-focus accents are differentiated by local cues, i.e., by longer duration when the focus is early in the sentence and by global cues, i.e., by enhancing the tonal contrast between the nuclear prominence of CW2 and the pre-nuclear prominence of CW1 when the focus is late in the sentence.

Mimological Reveries? Disconfirming the Hypothesis of Phono-Emotional Iconicity in Poetry.

The present study retested previously reported empirical evidence suggesting an iconic relation between sound and emotional meaning in poetry. To this end, we analyzed the frequency of certain phoneme classes in 48 German poems and correlated them with ratings for emotional classification. Our analyses provide evidence for a link between the emotional classification of poems (joyful vs. sad) and the perception of tonal contrast as reflected in the attribution of phenomenological sound qualia (bright vs. dark). However, we could not confirm any of the previous hypotheses and findings regarding either a connection between the frequencies of occurrence of specific vowel classes and the perception of tonal contrast, or a relation between the frequencies of occurrence of consonant classes and emotional classification.

Materials characterization for multilayer electron beam lithography

Successful implementation of multilayer lithography to fabricate three-dimensional structures involves depositing multiple layers of radiation sensitive materials with necessary dose and tone contrast. Resists are radiation sensitive materials (usually polymers dissolved in solvents) used in micro- and nanolithography. Currently, they are deposited on wafers using the spin coating process. Solvent incompatibilities between different resist systems can cause unwanted dissolution and intermixing of adjacent layers. Here, the authors show the use of Hansen solubility parameters to identify compatible solvents and developers. Multiple solubility models have been proposed, and Hansen solubility parameters are the most widely accepted. The Hansen solubility parameters are used to form a three dimensional space in which polymers and their solubility in different solvents can be represented as spheres. This representation makes it convenient to select compatible solvents and developers. It can also provide necessary guidance to synthesize compatible polymer systems for enhancing the lithographic technique.

The nature of tone sandhi in Sixian Hakka

Sixian Hakka is a Hakka dialect spoken in Taiwan. The language has four contrastive tones on non-checked syllables: 24, 11, 31, and 55. But before 24 or 55, a tone sandhi pattern changes 24 to 11, neutralizing the tonal contrast to three. We report two experiments that tap into the nature of this tone sandhi pattern in this paper. The first is a nonce-probe test, in which participants produced novel words that met the sandhi environment (/24-24/, /24-55/), and the f0 of the first syllable was compared to the f0 produced in real words to test the productivity of the sandhi. The second is an auditory lexical decision experiment with auditory priming, which tested whether disyllabic tone sandhi words were primed by monosyllables that shared the base tone or sandhi tone of the first syllable. Both experiments were conduced in Miaoli, Taiwan. We will report data from 15 participants for the first experiment and 32 for the second experiments. Together with experimental studies on various types of tone sandhi patterns elsewhere (e.g., Mandarin, Taiwanese), the results here will shed further light on how speakers internalize complex tonal alternation. The study also provides experimental data on an understudied and disenfranchised language.

Acoustics of phonation types and tones in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec

Zapotec languages are known for their complex tonal and phonation systems. Fieldwork in Santiago Laxopa Zapotec (SLZ), an undocumented language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, suggests the implementation of six tones (high, mid, low, high-falling, mid-falling and rising) and four phonation types (modal, creaky, checked and breathy). We report on the reliability of acoustic measures such as (H1-H2) and (H1-A1), which have previously been reported to characterize phonation types. Spectral measurements including H1, H2 (first and second harmonics), A1 (amplitude of F1) and A2 (amplitude of F2) are taken from vowels in near minimal pairs controlled for tones and quality. We also report on the relative implementation of tone and phonation. Silverman (1997) argues that languages with contrastive tone and phonation optimize the realization of laryngeal events such that non-modal vowels have a modal portion where the tonal event is implemented. We discuss if Silverman’s predictions are borne out in SLZ.

Laryngeal contrasts in the Tai dialect of Cao Bằng

The Tai dialect spoken in Cao Bằng province, Vietnam, is at an intermediate stage between tonal register split and the accompanying transphonologization of a voicing contrast into a dual-register tone system. While the initial sonorants have completely lost their historical voicing distinction and developed a six-way tonal contrast, the obstruent series still preserves the original voicing contrast, leaving the tonal split incomplete. This paper presents the first acoustic study of tones and onsets in Cao Bằng Tai. Although f0, VOT, and voice quality were all found to play a role in the system of laryngeal contrasts, the three speakers considered varied in terms of the patterns of acoustic cues used to distinguish between onset types, particularly the breathy voiced onset //. From the diachronic perspective, our findings may help to explain why the reflex of modal pre-voiced stops (*b) can be either aspirated or unaspirated voiceless stops.

Discrimination of Lexical Tones in the First Year of Life

In the current study, we examined the developmental course of the perception of non‐native tonal contrast. We tested 4, 6 and 12‐month‐old Dutch infants on their discrimination of Chinese low‐rising tone and low‐dipping tone using the visual fixation paradigm. The infants were tested in two conditions that differed in terms of degree of variability. The 4‐month‐olds did not show discrimination effect in either condition. The 6‐ and 12‐month‐old infants, however, discriminated the tones in both conditions. The improvement of perception might be the result of cognitive development carried over from learning the native phonology. Infants can become better listeners in general in the first year of life, as well as get cognitively better equipped in dealing with the variable input in speech in general. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Tone and registrogenesis in Quiaviní Zapotec

Tone and phonation type are known to show complex interactions. I argue that breathy vowels in one Central Zapotec variety, San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (Otomanguean, Mexico), has resulted from an original tonal contrast between the low and rising tones (registrogenesis), based both on language-internal and comparative evidence with other closely-related Central Zapotec varieties. The case of Central Zapotec is unusual in that the direction of the sound change is from a tonal contrast to a phonation contrast, while in other known cases the direction is usually the opposite.

The developmental trajectories of attention distribution and segment-tone integration in Dutch learners of Mandarin tones

This study investigates how beginner and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin process tonal information. An ABX task was adopted to investigate phonological discrimination of Mandarin tones and segment-tone integration in Dutch learners of Mandarin, with both native Mandarin and Dutch speakers (without tonal learning experience) as control groups. Results showed a developmental path in lexical tone processing. The beginner learners could not process tonal contrast adequately at the phonological level, and they processed segmental and tonal information separately, like native Dutch listeners without Mandarin experience. The advanced learners showed a good phonological discrimination of tonal contrasts. They showed a more native-like pattern in distributing their attention between segmental and tonal information, and they processed the two dimensions in an integrated manner, similar to native Mandarin listeners. This suggests that the acquisition of new tonal categories in L2 involves a redistribution of attention along perceptual dimensions and the development of segment-tone integration.

Image enhancement based on in vivo hyperspectral gastroscopic images: a case study.

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has been recognized as a powerful tool for noninvasive disease detection in the gastrointestinal field. However, most of the studies on HSI in this field have involved ex vivo biopsies or resected tissues. We proposed an image enhancement method based on in vivo hyperspectral gastroscopic images. First, we developed a flexible gastroscopy system capable of obtaining in vivo hyperspectral images of different types of stomach disease mucosa. Then, depending on a specific object, an appropriate band selection algorithm based on dependence of information was employed to determine a subset of spectral bands that would yield useful spatial information. Finally, these bands were assigned to be the color components of an enhanced image of the object. A gastric ulcer case study demonstrated that our method yields higher color tone contrast, which enhanced the displays of the gastric ulcer regions, and that it will be valuable in clinical applications.

Perception of tones by bilingual infants learning non-tone languages

This paper examines the ability of bilingual infants who were learning Dutch and another non-tone language to discriminate tonal contrasts. All infants from 5 to 18 months of age succeeded in discriminating a tonal contrast of Mandarin Chinese (Tone 1 versus Tone 4) and showed a U-shaped pattern when facing a less acoustically salient manipulated version (contracted) of the aforementioned contrast. Specifically, infants showed initial sensitivity to the contracted contrast during their early months, followed by a loss of sensitivity at the stage where tonal perceptual reorganization typically occurs, and a sensitivity rebound by the end of the first year after birth. Compared to a previous studying of ours testing monolingual Dutch infants (Liu & Kager, 2014), the discrimination patterns of bilingual infants revealed both similarities and differences. On one hand, as with monolinguals, non-tone-learning bilingual infants’ tonal perception presented plasticity influenced by contrast acoustic salience along the trajectory of perceptual reorganization; as well as a general U-shaped perceptual pattern when discriminating non-native tones. On the other hand, bilingual infants appeared to regain sensitivity to the contracted tonal contrast at an earlier age (11–12 months) in comparison with monolinguals infants (17–18 months). We provide several explanations, stemming from the simultaneous exposure to two languages, to account for the 6-month bilingual perceptual plasticity from linguistic and cognitive perspectives. The overall outcomes of the study offer insights into the infant perceptual reorganization and language development trajectory, expand on the differences between monolingual and bilingual language development, and broaden our understanding of the influence of bilingual exposure to the perception of non-native contrasts in infancy from linguistic and cognitive perspectives.

Encoding lexical tones in jTRACE: a simulation of monosyllabic spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese.

Despite its prevalence as one of the most highly influential models of spoken word recognition, the TRACE model has yet to be extended to consider tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese. A key reason for this is that the model in its current state does not encode lexical tone. In this report, we present a modified version of the jTRACE model in which we borrowed on its existing architecture to code for Mandarin phonemes and tones. Units are coded in a way that is meant to capture the similarity in timing of access to vowel and tone information that has been observed in previous studies of Mandarin spoken word recognition. We validated the model by first simulating a recent experiment that had used the visual world paradigm to investigate how native Mandarin speakers process monosyllabic Mandarin words (Malins & Joanisse, 2010). We then subsequently simulated two psycholinguistic phenomena: (1) differences in the timing of resolution of tonal contrast pairs, and (2) the interaction between syllable frequency and tonal probability. In all cases, the model gave rise to results comparable to those of published data with human subjects, suggesting that it is a viable working model of spoken word recognition in Mandarin. It is our hope that this tool will be of use to practitioners studying the psycholinguistics of Mandarin Chinese and will help inspire similar models for other tonal languages, such as Cantonese and Thai.

Commentary: Tonal complexity in non-tonal languages

Everett et al. (2015) established that complex tone languages are frequent in humid and warm areas and sparse in colder and dryer ones, proposing that this finding is to be explained by a less efficient vibration process of the vocal folds in dryer climates. Everett et al. (2016) are making the case that this result merits research addressing the hypothesis that the deleterious effects of laryngeal desiccation on voicing affects the phonological structures of languages. Their additional plea is that such efforts might preferably be methodologically varied and address predictions that are formulated from different perspectives along the presumed chain of cause and effect. My response addresses the question whether the prediction can be tested on a different typological group of languages, their class of pitch accent languages and non-tonal languages. Two issues here are the extent to which variation in complexity can be established in this group of languages and, assuming the answer is affirmative, the definition of an appropriate complexity measure for them. Everett et al. (2016) observe that the lexical functional load in tone languages is higher than in languages ‘in which this burden typically affects at most one syllable per word’ or languages where ‘pitch modulation is mostly used to convey pragmatic information at the phrasal level’. Before considering the relevance of these languages to the research issue, I would like to make some typological comments. The characterization of one syllabic tone contrast per word arguably covers all the indigenous European language varieties which have been described as having lexical tone, like varieties of Northern Bizkaian Basque, Norwegian–Swedish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Limburgish–Central Franconian, Bosnian–Croatian–Serbian–Slovenian (van der Hulst 1999). It is in fact hard to see such languages as a coherent group. Even just the European group represents a typologically quite varied collection. Judging by the Lekeitio variety …

Representation and Processing of Lexical Tone and Tonal Variants: Evidence from the Mismatch Negativity.

Pronunciation variation is ubiquitous in the speech signal. Different models of lexical representation have been put forward to deal with speech variability, which differ in the level as well as the nature of mental representation. We present the first mismatch negativity (MMN) study investigating the effect of allophonic variation on the mental representation and neural processing of lexical tones. Native speakers of Standard Chinese (SC) participated in an oddball electroencephalography (EEG) experiment. All stimuli have the same segments (ma) but different lexical tones: level [T1], rising [T2], and dipping [T3]. In connected speech with a T3T3 sequence, the first T3 may undergo allophonic change and is produced with a rising pitch contour (T3V), similar to the lexical T2 pitch contour. Four oddball conditions were constructed (T1/T3, T3/T1, T2/T3, T3/T2; standard/deviant). All four conditions elicited MMN effects, with the T1–T3 pair eliciting comparable MMNs, but the T2–T3 pair asymmetrical MMN effects. There were significantly greater and earlier MMN effects in the T2/T3 condition than that in the reversed T3/T2 condition. Furthermore, the T3/T2 condition showed more rightward MMN effects than the T2/T3 condition and the T1–T3 pair. Such asymmetries suggest co-activation of long-term memory representations of both T3 and T3V when T3 serves as the standard. The acoustic similarity between the activated T3V (by the standard T3) and the incoming deviant stimulus T2 induces acoustic processing of the tonal contrast in the T3/T2 condition, similar to that of within-category lexical tone processing, which is in contrast to the processing of between-category lexical tones observed in the T2/T3, T1/T3, and T3/T1 conditions.