Tonal Language Research Articles

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 remains poorly represented in cochlear implant (CI) systems. Currently, there is still a lack of understanding of sensitivity to F0 change in CI users who speak tonal languages. In the present study, just-noticeable differences (JNDs) of F0 contour and F0 level changes in Mandarin-speaking children with CIs were measured and compared with those in their age-matched normal-hearing (NH) peers. Results showed that children with CIs demonstrated significantly larger JND of F0 contour (JND-C) change and F0 level (JND-L) change compared to NH children. Further within-group comparison revealed that the JND-C change was significantly smaller than the JND-L change among children with CIs, whereas the opposite pattern was observed among NH children. No significant correlations were seen between JND-C change/JND-L change and age at implantation /duration of CI use. The contrast between children with CIs and NH children in sensitivity to F0 contour and F0 level change suggests different mechanisms of F0 processing in these two groups as a result of different hearing experiences.

Morphophonemics in the Lamalera Dialect of Lamaholot

Every language has differences and similarities in its linguistic systems. This is based on the assumption that the languages used by humans around the world come from one common ancestor. However, there are phenomena which are peculiar to each language. Morphophonemic alternation is a universal phenomenon. This means that all languages have this phenomenon. However, there are interesting peculiarities, for example, the morphophonemic alternations in agglutinative languages differ from isolating languages, tonal languages and inflecting languages. Lamaholot language is is not agglutinative, nor is it anlative (?) nor is it tonal. As a language characterized by neither agglutination, isolation nor tone, Lamaholot language has interesting morphophonemic phenomena to study. There is an elision or elimination of sounds, there is the addition or insertion of sounds, there is the preservation of sounds and certain sounds that are altered due to the addition of other sounds. This uniqueness occurs because Lamaholot Language does not have verb affixes as a strategy for morphophonemic change.

Do L1 tone language speakers enjoy a perceptual advantage in processing English contrastive prosody?*

AbstractThis study compared the ability of English monolinguals and Mandarin–English bilinguals to make use of English contrastive prosody not only in natural speech but also in masked speech, in which the only available information was prosodic. In contrast to earlier studies (Choi et al., 2019; Choi, 2021; Tong et al., 2015) which found that L1 tone language speakers outperformed native speakers in tasks involving the use of pitch to identify stress position in English, we did not find a similar advantage for Mandarin–English bilinguals in the interpretation of English contrastive prosody, even under conditions that enforced reliance on pitch contours. These findings are consistent with other studies suggesting that the integration of prosodic information into discourse is an area of particular difficulty for L2 speakers.

How do morning and friendly ads influence mobile advertising? A mediation perspective using appraisal theory

ABSTRACT Mobile advertising accounted for 137 billion dollars or 55% of 2021 U.S. total digital advertising expenditures. Delivery time and tone of language in advertisements (ads) are two little explored characteristics in mobile advertising. This paper examines how morning delivery and the use of a friendly language tone in ads are related to customer purchase intention. Based on survey data from the U.S. population, morning ads with a friendly tone are less irritating and positively influence customer attitude toward mobile learning from the ads, which result in increasing consumer purchase intention. In other words, morning and friendly-toned ads have a positive indirect impact on purchase intention. This research contributes to the body of literature on mobile marketing by providing empirical evidence on the value of delivery time and language tone of mobile communication because such delivery avoids irritating users and increases purchase intention. The developed research model is supported by the appraisal theory of emotions.

Vocabulary Growth in Mandarin-Speaking Children With Bilateral Cochlear Implants, Bimodal Stimulation, or Unilateral Cochlear Implants During the First Year After Activation.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate vocabulary development in Mandarin-speaking children with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs), bimodal stimulation (CI plus hearing aids [HAs]), or unilateral CIs during the first year after CI activation. Participants included 23 children with simultaneous bilateral CIs, 23 children with bimodal stimulation, and 15 children with unilateral CIs. They all received CIs before 30 months of age. Parents were asked to endorse words that their child could understand only or understand and say using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese at the day of CI activation and 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after CI activation. Receptive and expressive vocabulary sizes were computed. Growth curve analysis revealed that children with simultaneous bilateral CIs demonstrated faster growth of receptive vocabulary than those with bimodal stimulation, followed by those with unilateral CIs. Moreover, children with simultaneous bilateral CIs reached the 100-word mark for receptive vocabulary earlier than children with bimodal stimulation, followed by those with unilateral CIs. There were no significant differences among the three groups in expressive vocabulary. Bilateral CIs have an advantage over bimodal stimulation in early receptive vocabulary development in Mandarin, a tone language. HA usage is still recommended for those who receive one CI.

Prosody perception in older adults

<p id=C9><italic>Prosody</italic>, which is defined as the variance in loudness or volume, changes in tempo or timing, and movement in pitch and intonation, plays an essential role in speech communication. The ability of speech communication, however, changes across the life span. It has been found that while word knowledge and syntactic processing during comprehension are largely preserved with aging, older individuals have deficits processing multiple acoustic cues about the intention and emotion of speakers, which can interfere with their perception of linguistic and affective prosodic cues, resulting in poor speech comprehension. <p id=C10>Older individuals have a diminished ability to decode linguistic prosody. They have difficulty processing pitch contour, word stress, intonation, and speeded utterances. Recent fMRI, ERPs, and EEG studies have demonstrated that younger and older individuals activate different brain regions or neural sensitivity in linguistic prosody perception. Furthermore, aging impairs older adults’ abilities to process affective prosody, particularly for the speech conveying negative emotions. Age has tremendous effects on the automatic encoding of emotional prosody, and there is a general decline in emotion recognition with aging. <p id=C11>Moreover, age-related diseases could have specific pathologic effects on prosody processing. Age-associated progressive deterioration of neuronal and physical functions affects older adults’ abilities to process time-frequency signals, especially for those with Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and tinnitus. Studies on older individuals with age-related diseases have obtained significant findings regarding the brain regions involved in prosody processing. It has been observed that the superior temporal gyrus in the right hemisphere is predominantly linked to the processing of affective prosodic cues and that damage to the left hemisphere can result in similar deficits. <p id=C12>Overall, current studies have carried out extensive explorations on prosody perception by older individuals, with considerable attention to the effects of different first languages and complex auditory environments. However, we thought that more in-depth studies should be conducted on the following topics. First, further explorations are needed to examine prosody processing in older adults with Mandarin and other dialect backgrounds. Specifically, given that Chinese is a tonal language with many dialects, it is unknown whether differences in tone and dialect can influence older adults’ linguistic and affective prosody perception. Secondly, more studies might be carried out to clarify the effects of complex auditory environments on prosody perception in older individuals. Previous studies have examined the impact of several noise types, which are merely part of the challenging conditions in daily communication. It is important to reveal older individuals’ prosody perception in specific situations of context, such as doctor-patient scenarios and family scenarios that they constantly experience. Thirdly, it is imperative to deepen our understanding of neural mechanisms underlying perceptual performance in complex prosodic tasks. Considering that there has been a multitude of neurological research on older adults with age-related diseases, more attention needs to be paid to the neurological performance of their healthy counterparts. Fourthly, further studies might also focus on prosody processing difficulties associated with age-related diseases, as it is still difficult to determine to what extent impairments of prosody perception in daily communication can predict age-related diseases. Finally, special attention needs to be drawn to the early intervention and the rehabilitation of prosody perception impairments in older individuals. It is still uncertain to what extent older adults, especially those with age-related diseases, can maintain or recover their abilities for prosody perception. A corresponding key issue is how to develop effective training methods for Chinese prosody perception rehabilitation. To sum up, future studies are expected to apply interdisciplinary theories and methodologies to explore prosody perception in older adults, which is of both theoretical and practical significance.

Phonological competition in Mandarin spoken word recognition

ABSTRACT Most of the world’s languages use both segment and lexical tone to distinguish word meanings. However, the few studies on spoken word recognition in tone languages show conflicting results concerning the relative contribution of (sub-)syllabic constituents, and the time course of how segmental and tonal information is utilised. In Experiments 1 & 2, participants listened to monosyllabic Mandarin words with the presence of a phonological competitor, which overlaps in either segmental syllable, onset and tone, rhyme and tone, or just tone. Eye movement results only confirmed the segmental syllable competition effect. Experiment 3 investigated the time course of segmental vs. tonal cue utilisation by manipulating their point of divergence (POD) and found that POD modulates the look trajectories of both segmental and tonal phonological competitors. While listeners can use both segmental and tonal information incrementally to constrain lexical activation, segmental syllable plays an advantageous role in Mandarin spoken word recognition.

The common limitations in auditory temporal processing for Mandarin Chinese and Japanese

The present investigation focused on how temporal degradation affected intelligibility in two types of languages, i.e., a tonal language (Mandarin Chinese) and a non-tonal language (Japanese). The temporal resolution of common daily-life sentences spoken by native speakers was systematically degraded with mosaicking (mosaicising), in which the power of original speech in each of regularly spaced time-frequency unit was averaged and temporal fine structure was removed. The results showed very similar patterns of variations in intelligibility for these two languages over a wide range of temporal resolution, implying that temporal degradation crucially affected speech cues other than tonal cues in degraded speech without temporal fine structure. Specifically, the intelligibility of both languages maintained a ceiling up to about the 40-ms segment duration, then the performance gradually declined with increasing segment duration, and reached a floor at about the 150-ms segment duration or longer. The same limitations for the ceiling performance up to 40 ms appeared for the other method of degradation, i.e., local time-reversal, implying that a common temporal processing mechanism was related to the limitations. The general tendency fitted to a dual time-window model of speech processing, in which a short (~ 20–30 ms) and a long (~ 200 ms) time-window run in parallel.

Phonetics Study in Turksh Poem of Shex Reza Talebani

Writing poem in Turkish at the nineteenth century by a Kurdish poet whose most of his poetry consists of satire, drew our attention to conduct this research. Due the cultural influence of Ottoman Empire, most of the Kurdish poets have chosen Turkish as a second or third language for their poetry. This research consists of abstract, introduction, main body results and the sources. The abstract is a discussion to introduce the research. In the introduction the main features of research have been illustrated which are the bibliography of the poet and the language tone has been used in his poetry, especially when composing Turkish poems. In the first section of this research, literature review during the Ottomans which is simultaneous with Shex Reza Talebani. Phonics has been discussed extensively as the basic language in his Turkish poetry. In the second section sound features, sound changes and sound events in Shex Reza’s Turkish poetry have been explained. At the end we reached some conclusions of his research and listing the references benefitted from for this work. In the final section the findings of this research have been elucidated as well as the list of references that have been used in this research. Reference: Bozkurt, K. (2020). Filoloji Alanında Akademik Çalışmalar. Ankara: Gece Kitaplığı. İNAL, İ. M. (1969). Son Asrın Türk Şairleri,. İstanbul: 2.cilt. Taqane, A. (2010). Şeyh Rızâ’yı Talebânî. Erbil: Aras. Terzibaşı, A. (2006). Kerkük'lü Şeyh Rızâ . Kerkük: 1.baskı. Uçak, S. (2014). Tarihte Türkler ve Kürtler Sempozyomu. Ankara: C.3. , B. (2007). Hiciv ve Meyhane Sohbetleri. İstanbul: Kastaş Yayınevi. TOPALOĞLU,Ahmet(1989),Dilbilgisi Terimleri Sözlüğü, Ötüken yayınları,İstanbul Ediskun, H. (1993). Yeni Türk Dilbilgisi. Remzi Hatipoğlu, Vecihe(1972), dilbilgisi Terimleri Sözlüğü, TDK yayınları, Ankara Bozkurt, Fuat. (2004). Türkiye Türkçesi Türkçe Öğretiminde Yeni Bir Yöntem. İstanbul: Kapı Yayınları. Yıldız, Osman(1999), Dilimizdeki Arapça ve Farsça Kökenli Kelimelerde Görülen Fonetik Değişmeler, Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, Sayı 4; s321-338. EKER,Süer (2015),Çağdaş Türk Dili, Grafiker Yayınları, 9.baskı, Ankara. VURAL,Hanifi- BÖLER,Tuncay (2011), Ses Ve Şekil Bilgisi, Kesit yayınları, İstanbul. ERGİN,Muharrem(2009), Üniversiteler için Türk Dili, Bayrak yayınları, İstanbul BANGUOĞLU, Tahsin. (2011), Türkçenin Grameri. (9. Baskı), TDK Yayınları, Ankara. GENCAN, T. N. (2001), Dil Bilgisi. (1. Baskı), Ayraç Yayınevi,Ankara BORAKAYİ,Sadiq (2008).Mejuy Wejeyi Kurdi,Aras yay. Erbil MUSTAFA,Şukur(2010).Şeyh Rıza Talebani Divanı, Aras yay.Erbil TERZİBAŞI,Ata(2011).Kerkük’lü Şeyh Rıza ve Türkçe Şiirleri, Aras yay.Erbil

Tones and Tunes: Melody and Part-Writing Exercises based on Ìgbò and Yorùbá Lyrics

This essay explores text-setting in two Nigerian tone languages through composition and re-composition exercises. Writing music based on indigenous language texts remains an essential aspect of maintaining artistic and cultural continuity with pre-colonial musical traditions.

Discovering phonetic inventories with crosslingual automatic speech recognition

The high cost of data acquisition makes Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model training problematic for most existing languages, including languages that do not even have a written script, or for which the phone inventories remain unknown. Past works explored multilingual training, transfer learning, as well as zero-shot learning in order to build ASR systems for these low-resource languages. While it has been shown that the pooling of resources from multiple languages is helpful, we have not yet seen a successful application of an ASR model to a language unseen during training. A crucial step in the adaptation of ASR from seen to unseen languages is the creation of the phone inventory of the unseen language.The ultimate goal of our work is to build the phone inventory of a language unseen during training in an unsupervised way without any knowledge about the language. In this paper, we (1) investigate the influence of different factors (i.e., model architecture, phonotactic model, type of speech representation) on phone recognition in an unknown language; (2) provide an analysis of which phones transfer well across languages and which do not in order to understand the limitations of and areas for further improvement for automatic phone inventory creation; and (3) present different methods to build a phone inventory of an unseen language in an unsupervised way. To that end, we conducted mono-, multi-, and crosslingual experiments on a set of 13 phonetically diverse languages and several in-depth analyses. We found a number of universal phone tokens (IPA symbols) that are well-recognized cross-linguistically. Through a detailed analysis of results, we conclude that unique sounds, similar sounds, and tone languages remain a major challenge for phonetic inventory discovery.

The Role of Categorical Perception and Acoustic Details in the Processing of Mandarin Tonal Alternations in Contexts: An Eye-Tracking Study.

This study investigated the perception of Mandarin tonal alternations in disyllabic words. In Mandarin, a low-dipping Tone3 is converted to a high-rising Tone2 when followed by another Tone3, known as third tone sandhi. Although previous studies showed statistically significant differences in F0 between a high-rising Sandhi-Tone3 (T3) and a Tone2, native Mandarin listeners failed to correctly categorize these two tones in perception tasks. The current study utilized the visual-world paradigm in eye-tracking to further examine whether acoustic details in lexical tone aid lexical access in Mandarin. Results showed that Mandarin listeners tend to process Tone2 as Tone2 whereas they tend to first process Sandhi-T3 as both Tone3 and Tone2, then later detect the acoustic differences between the two tones revealed by the sandhi context, and finally activate the target word during lexical access. The eye-tracking results suggest that subtle acoustic details of F0 may facilitate lexical access in automatic fashion in a tone language.

Distinct but integrated processing of lexical tones, vowels, and consonants in tonal language speech perception: Evidence from mismatch negativity

The processing of lexical tones, vowels, and consonants is significant in tonal language speech perception. However, it remains unclear whether their processing is similar or distinct concerning the extent and time course and whether their processing is independent or integrated. Thus in the present study, we conducted two event-related potential (ERP) experiments to explore how native speakers of Cantonese process lexical tones (including level and contour tones), vowels, and consonants in real vs. pseudo-Cantonese words with mismatch negativity (MMN). The MMN amplitudes and latencies showed that lexical tones and vowels were processed similarly in extent and time course. Lexical tones and consonants were processed differently in extent and time course. Vowels and consonants were processed to similar extents but over different time courses. Lexicality (real words vs. pseudowords) and tonal type (level vs. contour tones) modulated the differences in the extent and time courses of processing between lexical tones/vowels and consonants. The MMN additivity analyses further suggested that the processing of lexical tones and vowels, lexical tones and consonants, and vowels and consonants were integrated regardless of lexicality and tonal type. The results revealed that distinct but integrated processing occurs for lexical tones, vowels, and consonants in the speech perception of tonal languages. The findings provided neurophysiological evidence for the mechanism underlying tonal language spoken word recognition. • Lexical tones and vowels are processed similarly in terms of extent and time course. • Lexical tones and consonants are processed differently in terms of extent and time course. • Vowels and consonants are processed to similar extents but over different time courses. • Lexical tones and vowels, lexical tones and consonants, and vowels and consonants are processed integrally. • Lexicality and tonal type modulate the differences between lexical tones/vowels and consonants processing.

Tone-driven epenthesis in Wamey

AbstractThis paper argues that tone-driven epenthesis is possible in tonal languages. In Wamey, an epenthetic [ə] is inserted to host a high tone in two contexts: first, to host a tone which would otherwise be left floating due to a restriction on rising tones (/cv̀cⒽ/ maps to [cv̀cə́] due to a ban *[cv̌c]); and second, to host a tone which is introduced by word-level morphology but is restricted from associating across a stem boundary. These patterns cannot be attributed to syllable phonotactics, which freely allow all consonants in the coda position. We assemble the evidence for tone-driven epenthesis, focusing on the distribution of final [ə] in lexical stem structure and [ə]-alternating suffixes. A simple OT analysis derives [ə]-epenthesis, utilising common constraints (e.g. *Rise, OCP(H), etc.) together with constraints against associating tone across prosodic boundaries. In total, Wamey epenthesis exemplifies the cultivation of segmental environments for the purpose of realising pitch targets.

An acoustic study of Tetsǫ́t’ıné stress: Iambic stress in a quantity-sensitive tone language

AbstractThis paper presents both distributional and acoustic phonetic evidence for iambic stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné (ISO: CHP), a Dene (Athapaskan) language with contrastive vowel length and four contrastive tones. In our acoustic study, we find that the primary correlate of stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné is duration, whereas intensity plays a secondary but statistically significant role. There was no statistically significant effect on F0 in our results. We discuss our results in relation to several proposals regarding the typology of stress systems. Based on the Functional Load Hypothesis (Berinstein 1979) and Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995, 2001), we find that our results are to some extent unexpected. We suggest that our results are most consistent with the Iambic–Trochaic Law (Hayes 1995), which predicts that iambic stress systems prefer to use duration as their primary stress correlate.

A PHONETIC EXPERIMENT ON THE TONES OF NANJING DIALECT

This study aims to reconstruct the border between tones, in Nanjing Dialect, converging towards similar contours due to sound change, using phonetic techniques for data exploration. The results of the auditory survey reveal a categorical perception in Nanjing Dialect, as often attested in tonal languages. The acoustic statistics of this experiment contribute to a more comprehensive image of tones represented by tone letters.

Building an Intelligent Tutoring System for Learning Polysemous Words in Moore

This paper presents the results of our research carried out as part of the building of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) to learn Moor´e, a tone language. A word in tone language may have many meanings according to the pitch. The system has an intelligent tutor to personalize and guide the learning of the transcription of polysemous words in Moor´e. This learning activity aims both to master the transcription and also to distinguish the lexical meaning of words according to the pitch used. A first step of this research has been the specification of the processes, inference and knowledge of the system. In this work we present the implementation and pedagogical assessment of the system. We designed the architecture of the ITS, the diagnosis of transcription errors and remediation approach. Then, we used the Petri net formalism to model the system dynamic in order to analyze its states and fix deadlocks. We developed the system in java and we evaluated its educational value by an experimentation with learners. This shows that the learning objectives can be achieved with this system.

Lip Reading in Cantonese

Lip reading aims at recognizing texts from a talking face without audio information. Due to the rapid development of deep learning techniques, researchers have made giant breakthroughs for both word-level and sentence-level English lip reading in recent years. Unlike English, it is difficult for Chinese to distinguish the lexical meanings, because Chinese is a tonal language. In addition, most of the existing Chinese lip reading datasets are designed for Mandarin, there are few for Cantonese. In this paper, we propose a word-level Cantonese lip reading dataset called CLRW which contains 800-word classes with 400,000 samples. For better practical applications, we do not limit gender, age, postures, light conditions, and speech speed to make CLRW closer to the real scene distribution. At first, we give a detailed description of the data collection process. Next, a novel two-branch network is proposed by us, named TBGL, which consists of a global branch and a local branch. The global branch models the whole lip and the local branch divides the feature into three parts to focus on subtle local lip motion. We jointly train these two branches and achieve comparable performance on LRW, CAS-VSR-W1K, and CLRW, respectively. Finally, we benchmark our dataset and perform a comprehensively analyze of the results, which demonstrate that CLRW is full of challenge, and it will bring a positive impact on further Cantonese lip reading tasks.

Reconsidering Tonal Procedures in J. S. Bach's First Year in Leipzig: Some Implications from the Wind-Player's Perspective

Only recently have Bach's use of multiple tonalities, different pitch levels, and unequal temperament been given both serious consideration and practical application in the performance of his sacred vocal works. By investigating the surviving performance material of works from his first year in Leipzig, this article explores the pragmatic decisions in the interconnected nexus of tonality, pitch, and tuning that impact our understanding of Bach's tonal language. The fact that Bach conceived music for performance in more than one key has implications for both the idiomatic treatment of instruments and the methods by which he aligned affects with specific keys. The continued use of tief-Cammerton (or A−2) across Bach's first cantata cycle of 1723–1724 is considered. Following procedures developed by Bruce Haynes, each case is examined. This results in a revised list of works that we can say conclusively were performed by Bach at this lower pitch. A pivotal work in this regard is the Magnificat in its two versions in E-flat and D major. The article also addresses the problems that Bach encountered when adapting material composed for performance at different pitches from the ones in place in Leipzig. As much as he sought practical solutions, the evidence suggests that in many cases, he was obliged to tolerate reusing music from Weimar and Cöthen in less-than-ideal circumstances where both instrumental and vocal parts were compromised by a change in pitch or tonality. The quest to find a tuning system suited to the demands of this repertoire has led to sixth-comma meantone temperament. The article concludes with a discussion of the application of this tuning orientation to multi-tonal performance and offers some considerations on how the intonation of non-fixed-pitch instruments can be treated in this context.

Autosegmental Neural Nets 2.0: An Extensive Study of Training Synchronous and Asynchronous Phones and Tones for Under-Resourced Tonal Languages

Autosegmental Neural Nets 2.0: An Extensive Study of Training Synchronous and Asynchronous Phones and Tones for Under-Resourced Tonal Languages