Tonal Language Research Articles

The Weight of Words: A Mixed Methods Study to Understand Indian Doctors’ Perspectives and Experiences of Patient Communication

Background: Effective doctor communication can lead to increased treatment adherence and improved self-management among individuals living with diabetes. Yet, there is limited research in India which examines how doctors communicate, especially in terms of verbal and nonverbal communication. Aims: (1) To examine communication in clinic (verbal, nonverbal and basic content) among Indian doctors specialized in diabetes and endocrine care, and (2) to explore doctors’ styles of verbal and nonverbal communication. Methods: Using a mixed methods design, a survey containing quantitative (n=834) and qualitative (n=648) elements was filled out by doctors specialized in the fields of diabetes and endocrinology in India. Questions in the quantitative section included questions such as addressing patients’ illness-related concerns, acknowledging challenges of using insulin, and non-verbal behaviours. The qualitative section focussed on elaborating some responses made to the quantitative section, such as questions about explaining the cause of illness, listing words and phrases that may potentially impact patients, and explaining why the patients need to be initiated on insulin. The data was analysed using descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis, respectively. Results: The findings of the quantitative study showed that the majority of the doctors (i) always greeted their patient as they entered the room (43.2%), (ii) addressed the risk of developing diabetes with patients’ siblings/children (87.9%), (iii) always acknowledged the challenges of using insulin (42.8%), and (iv) never asked patients’ experiences at the end of the consultation (31.9%). All common communication cues were rated as extremely important; eye contact (48.7%), tone of voice (41.5%), body language (39.6%), and words and phrases (41.8%). The qualitative findings revealed that doctors preferred to use verbal communication such as using authoritative language, educating patients using facts, analogies and behavioural information, employing empathetic language on occasion. Doctors also reported using negative words that portrayed fear, blame and disengagement in order to promote adherence. Discussion and Conclusion: The findings suggest that doctors rely on verbal rather than nonverbal communication when interacting with patients, with fear messages being a favoured means of ensuring adherence. It is possible that this may be because, while recognizing the value of nonverbal methods, doctors lack training in using these techniques in communication. Therefore, developing a communication skill training program for Indian doctors focussed on empathic and nonverbal communication can help to improve consultation and patient outcomes (e.g., adherence, patient satisfaction).

Arguments for a Privative L Tone in Northern Tepehuan

This paper proposes that Northern Tepehuan is a tonal language with just one lexical tone 'low tone' and is therefore a privative tonal system. L tone is sufficient to explain the pitch contrasts in the language and also necessary to explain the "inconsistencies" of stress assignment. Stress is normally predictable from the size of the word, from syllable-weight, and is cued by a H* intonational tone. Nonetheless, in words that do not obey the Stress-to-Weight constraint, it could be argued that stress is displaced from the heavy syllable by virtue of a high-ranked *Align(Head/Low) constraint that prohibits the placement of stress on a syllable with a lexical L. The L tone also explains why the H* intonational tone can be displaced from stressed syllables.

Analysis and modeling of dialect information in Ao, a low resource language.

Ao is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nagaland, India. It is a low resource, tonal language with three lexical tones, namely, high, mid, and low. However, tone assignment on lexical words may differ among the three dialects of Ao, namely, Chungli, Mongsen, and Changki. In this work, an acoustic study is conducted on the three tones in the three dialects of Ao. It was found that the acoustic characteristics of the tones in the Changki dialect are markedly different from that of the Chungli and the Mongsen dialects. Hence, in the latter part of the work, automatic dialect identification (DID) in the Ao dialects is attempted with Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Shifted Delta Cepstral coefficients, and F0 features using the Gaussian Mixture models. It is confirmed that in both text-dependent and text-independent DID, the F0 features improve the accuracy of classification.

Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?

AbstractCreole languages have generally not figured prominently in cross-linguistic studies of word-prosodic typology. In this paper, we present a phonological analysis of the prosodic system of Lung’Ie or Principense (ISO 639-3 code: pre), a Portuguese-lexifier creole language spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Lung’Ie has produced a unique result of the contact between the two different prosodic systems common in creolization: a stress-accent lexifier and tone language substrates. The language has a restrictive privative H/Ø tone system, in which the /H/ is culminative, but non-obligatory. Since rising and falling tones are contrastive on long vowels, the tone must be marked underlyingly. While it is clear that tonal indications are needed, Lung’Ie reveals two properties more expected of an accentual system: (i) there can only be one heavy syllable per word; (ii) this syllable must bear a H tone. This raises the question of whether syllables with a culminative H also have metrical prominence, i.e. stress. However, the problem with equating stress with H tone is that Lung’Ie has two kinds of nouns: those with a culminative H and those which are toneless. The nouns with culminative H are 87% of Portuguese origin, incorporated through stress-to-tone alignment, while the toneless ones are 92% of African origin. Although other creole languages have been reported with split systems of “accented” vs. fully specified tonal lexemes, and others with mixed systems of tone and stress, Lung’Ie differs from these cases in treating African origin words as toneless, a quite surprising result. We consider different analyses and conclude that Lung’Ie has a privative /H/ tone system with the single unusual stress-like property of weight-to-tone.

Normative Nasalance Values in Vietnamese With Southern Dialect: Vowel and Tone Effects.

Purpose The purpose of the current study was to examine normative nasalance values in Vietnamese adult speakers with Southern dialect and to investigate the effects of vowels and tones on nasalance. Previous studies examining nasalance have been mainly conducted with Indo-European languages. Limited information on nasalance is available in tone languages other than Chinese. Furthermore, tone and vowel effects on nasalance scores in tone languages have not been fully examined. Method Nasalance scores of various speech stimuli including passages, syllables, and prolonged vowels were obtained from Vietnamese-speaking adults with Southern dialect (M age = 23 years) using a nasometer (KayPENTAX 6450). Results The average nasalance scores of Southern Vietnamese adult speakers were 24.16%, 38.17%, and 70.03% for the oral, oral-nasal, and nasal passages, respectively. Southern Vietnamese speakers produced the highest nasalance scores on the vowel /a/, followed by /i/ and /u/. Nasalance scores of stimuli produced with the falling and restricted tone were significantly lower than those produced with the other tones. Conclusions The normative nasalance values of the current study will contribute as a reference index for the Vietnamese language. The effects of vowels and tones can also provide insight into the development of nasalance testing stimuli and for characterizing nasalance values across languages.

Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?

AbstractCreole languages have generally not figured prominently in cross-linguistic studies of word-prosodic typology. In this paper, we present a phonological analysis of the prosodic system of Lung’Ie or Principense (ISO 639-3 code: pre), a Portuguese-based creole language spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Lung’Ie has produced a unique result of the contact between the two different prosodic systems common in creolization: a stress-accent lexifier and tone language substrates. The language has a restrictive privative H/Ø tone system, in which the /H/ is culminative, but non-obligatory. Since rising and falling tones are contrastive on long vowels, the tone must be marked underlyingly. While it is clear that tonal indications are needed, Lung’Ie reveals two properties more expected of an accentual system: (i) there can only be one heavy syllable per word; (ii) this syllable must bear a H tone. This raises the question of whether syllables with a culminative H also have metrical prominence, i.e. stress. However, the problem with equating stress with H tone is that Lung’Ie has two kinds of nouns: those with a culminative H and those which are toneless. The nouns with culminative H are 87% of Portuguese origin, incorporated through stress-to-tone alignment, while the toneless ones are 92% of African origin. Although other creole languages have been reported with split systems of “accented” vs. fully specified tonal lexemes, and others with mixed systems of tone and stress, Lung’Ie differs from these cases in treating African origin words as toneless, a quite surprising result. We consider different analyses and conclude that Lung’Ie has a privative /H/ tone system with the single unusual stress-like property of weight-to-tone.

The tone system of Ruc and tonogenesis in Vietic languages

Rục, a dialect of the ethnic group of Chứt spoken in the mountainous area in Quảng Bình province, has been describing as a tonal language with four tones characterized by pitch (F0), voice quality and laryngeal features; however, there has been no experimental study on the tone system of Rục. In Summer 2019, we recorded 20 Ruc speakers (10 women) reading a wordlist including 66 words made of five vowels /iː, ɛː, uː, ɔː, aː/ in combination with different dental and velar onsets and the four tones. The results show that the four tones in Rục are differentiated by pitch height and pitch contour. Moreover, spectral measurements (H1-H2, H1-A1, H1-A2 and CPP) indicate that two low-register tones (derived from voiced onsets) have a breathy voice compared to a modal voice in two high-register tones (derived from voiceless onsets). In words with the two low-register tones, vowels tend to be pronounced with a higher aperture (a lower F1) than in high-register tones context. These results support and update theories on tonongenesis and registrogenesis in Vietic languages and Mon-Khmer languages in general.

Integral perception, but separate processing: The perceptual normalization of lexical tones and vowels

In tonal languages, speech variability arises in both lexical tone (i.e., suprasegmentally) and vowel quality (segmentally). Listeners can use surrounding speech context to overcome variability in both speech cues, a process known as extrinsic normalization. Although vowels are the main carriers of tones, it is still unknown whether the combined percept (lexical tone and vowel quality) is normalized integrally or in partly separate processes. Here we used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the time course of lexical tone normalization and vowel normalization to answer this question. Cantonese adults listened to synthesized three-syllable stimuli in which the identity of a target syllable — ambiguous between high vs. mid-tone (Tone condition) or between /o/ vs. /u/ (Vowel condition) — was dependent on either the tone range (Tone condition) or the formant range (Vowel condition) of the first two syllables. It was observed that the ambiguous tone was more often interpreted as a high-level tone when the context had a relatively low pitch than when it had a high pitch (Tone condition). Similarly, the ambiguous vowel was more often interpreted as /o/ when the context had a relatively low formant range than when it had a relatively high formant range (Vowel condition). These findings show the typical pattern of extrinsic tone and vowel normalization. Importantly, the EEG results of participants showing the contrastive normalization effect demonstrated that the effects of vowel normalization could already be observed within the N2 time window (190–350 ms), while the first reliable effect of lexical tone normalization on cortical processing was observable only from the P3 time window (220–500 ms) onwards. The ERP patterns demonstrate that the contrastive perceptual normalization of lexical tones and that of vowels occur at least in partially separate time windows. This suggests that the extrinsic normalization can operate at the level of phonemes and tonemes separately instead of operating on the whole syllable at once.

Longer Cochlear Implant Experience Leads to Better Production of Mandarin Tones for Early Implanted Children.

Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tones, since CIs do not transmit pitch information effectively. It has been suggested that longer CI experience provides additional benefits for children implanted early, enabling them to achieve language abilities similar to that of normal-hearing (NH) children (Colletti 2009). Mandarin is a tonal language with four lexical tones and a neutral tone (T0), characterized by distinct pitch and durational patterns. It has been suggested that early implantation (i.e., before 2 years) greatly benefits the acquisition of Mandarin tones by children with CIs (Tang et al. 2019c). In this study, we extend those findings to investigate the effect of CI experience on the acquisition of Mandarin tones for children implanted early. We asked the extent to which they were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns of both lexical tones and T0 as a function of CI experience, and the extent to which their tonal productions were acoustically like that of NH children. Forty-four NH 3-year olds and 28 children implanted with CIs between 1 and 2 years, aged 3 to 7, were recruited. The children with CIs were grouped according to the length of CI experience: 3 to 6 years, 2 to 3 years, and 1 to 2 years. Lexical tone and T0 productions were elicited using a picture-naming task. Tonal productions from the children with CIs were acoustically analyzed and compared with those from the NH children. Children with 3 to 6 years of CI experience were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns for both lexical tones and T0, with NH-like acoustic realizations. Children with 2 to 3 years of CI experience were also able to produce the expected tonal patterns, although their productions were not yet NH-like. Those with only 1 to 2 years of CI experience, however, were not yet able to produce the distinct acoustic patterns for either lexical tones or T0. These results provide acoustic evidence demonstrating that, when Mandarin-speaking children are implanted before the age of 2, only those with 3 to 6 years of experience were able to produce NH-like tones, including both lexical tone and T0. Children with shorter CI experience (less than 3 years) were unable to produce distinct acoustic patterns for the different tones. This suggests that at least 3 years of CI experience is still needed for early implanted children to acquire tonal distinctions similar to those of NH 3-year olds.

Tagging Tone for Mandarin Pinyin Based on Sequence Labelling

Generally, fundamental frequency (F0) is applied as the clue for tone recognition in normal speech. Tone recognition in whisper speech without F0 could be based on the temporal and spectral cues. However, the Mandarin Electro-Laryngeal (EL) speech with fixed F0 has no tone information. Therefore, the tone recognition of Mandarin EL speech is so difficult. And the researches about tone recognition for Mandarin EL speech is insufficient. In this paper, a new method labelling the tone for pinyin is proposed based on the context information to identify the tone of Mandarin speech without tone information. The experiment result shows that the precision, recall and the F value are all above 97% based on the test dataset. The amount of semantic information influences the performance of proposed method. If the amount of semantic information is little, the accuracy of tone labelling would be poor. The result shows that the proposed method has a good precision and robustness. The method can label the tone for pinyin without any tone information only based on the context information. The proposed method can label tones for tonal language, such as the Mandarin speech.

Recognition of affective prosody in autism spectrum conditions: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Differences in understanding others' emotions and attitudes through features in speech (e.g. intonation) have been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions, which contribute greatly to their social communication challenges. However, some studies reported that individuals with autism spectrum condition performed comparably to typically developing individuals on affective prosody recognition. Here, we provide a comprehensive review with statistical analysis of 23 existing studies on this topic to examine potential factors that could explain the discrepancies. Compared with typically developing individuals, autism spectrum condition participants generally appeared to encounter more difficulties in affective prosody recognition. But this finding was likely due to the tendency of the existing research to overly focus on deficits in autism. The affective prosody recognition performance in individuals with autism spectrum condition was closely related to the number of answer options offered to them. Moreover, the degree of difficulty in affective prosody recognition encountered by individuals with autism spectrum condition varied across emotions. The findings of this systematic review highlighted the need for further research on affective prosody recognition in autism (e.g. studies that include tonal language speakers and autism spectrum condition individuals with lower cognitive or verbal abilities).

The Musical Ear Test: Norms and correlates from a large sample of Canadian undergraduates.

We sought to establish norms and correlates for the Musical Ear Test (MET), an objective test of musical ability. A large sample of undergraduates at a Canadian university (N > 500) took the 20-min test, which provided a Total score as well as separate scores for its Melody and Rhythm subtests. On each trial, listeners judged whether standard and comparison auditory sequences were the same or different. Norms were derived as percentiles, Z-scores, and T-scores. The distribution of scores was approximately normal without floor or ceiling effects. There were no gender differences on either subtest or the total score. As expected, scores on both subtests were correlated with performance on a test of immediate recall for nonmusical auditory stimuli (Digit Span Forward). Moreover, as duration of music training increased, so did performance on both subtests, but starting lessons at a younger age was not predictive of better musical abilities. Listeners who spoke a tone language exhibited enhanced performance on the Melody subtest but not on the Rhythm subtest. The MET appears to have adequate psychometric characteristics that make it suitable for researchers who seek to measure musical abilities objectively.

The differential effects of vowel and onset consonant lengthening on speech segmentation: Evidence from Taiwanese Southern Min.

A review of previous speech segmentation research suggests the prediction that listeners of Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), a lexical tone language, would exploit vowel lengthening and syllable-onset consonant lengthening to locate word ends and beginnings, respectively. Yet, correlations between segment duration and tone identity in tone languages along with some TSM-specific phonological phenomena may work against such use. Two artificial language learning experiments examined TSM listeners' use of the lengthening cues. The listeners heard the words of an artificial language (e.g., /ba.nu.me/) repeated continuously and identified them in a subsequent two-alternative forced-choice test. Experiment I revealed that their segmentation benefits from and only from word-initial onset lengthening or word-final vowel lengthening, supporting the prediction. Experiment II further demonstrated that these two cues in combination synergistically support segmentation at least when compared to word-initial onset lengthening alone, consistent with previous findings regarding complementary cues. These results furnish additional evidence that vowel and onset consonant lengthening affect segmentation in different ways, possibly reflecting a functional division between vowels and consonants that is supported by some prosody-computing mechanism. Additionally, vowel lengthening seems to affect segmentation to a greater extent than onset consonant lengthening. Possible explanations for this and further issues are discussed.

Human cortical encoding of pitch in tonal and non-tonal languages

Languages can use a common repertoire of vocal sounds to signify distinct meanings. In tonal languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, pitch contours of syllables distinguish one word from another, whereas in non-tonal languages, such as English, pitch is used to convey intonation. The neural computations underlying language specialization in speech perception are unknown. Here, we use a cross-linguistic approach to address this. Native Mandarin- and English- speaking participants each listened to both Mandarin and English speech, while neural activity was directly recorded from the non-primary auditory cortex. Both groups show language-general coding of speaker-invariant pitch at the single electrode level. At the electrode population level, we find language-specific distribution of cortical tuning parameters in Mandarin speakers only, with enhanced sensitivity to Mandarin tone categories. Our results show that speech perception relies upon a shared cortical auditory feature processing mechanism, which may be tuned to the statistics of a given language.

Phone based acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition for Punjabi language

Punjabi language is a tonal language belonging to an Indo-Aryan language family and has a number of speakers all around the world. Punjabi language has gained acceptability in the media & communication and therefore deserves to have a place in the growing field of automatic speech recognition which has been explored already for a number of other Indian and foreign languages successfully. Some work has been done in the field of isolated word speech recognition for Punjabi language, but only using whole word based acoustic models. A phone based approach has yet to be applied for Punjabi language speech recognition. This paper describes an automatic speech recognizer that recognizes isolated word speech and connected word speech using a triphone based acoustic model on the HTK 3.4.1 speech Engine and compares the performance with acoustic whole word model based ASR system. Word recognition accuracy of isolated word speech was 92.05% for acoustic whole word model based system and 97.14% for acoustic triphone model based system whereas word recognition accuracy of connected word speech was 87.75% for acoustic whole word model based system and 91.62% for acoustic triphone model based system.

The Case for Eight Igbo Tones

Despite research findings to the contrary, many still regard Igbo as a two-tone language, with some recognizing an additional third tone. However, this simplified two-tone system (or two-plus-one system) does not tell the full story of Igbo tones or reflect all the research in Igbo linguistics. Tone testing using a soundboard reveals eight tones (four long and four short ones) which occur in the default pronunciation of common Igbo words and which every Igbo speaker uses frequently. An eight-tone system for individual words better explains the complexity of Igbo tonality and reveals interesting possibilities about the evolution of the Igbo language and its relationship with other tonal languages, such as Chinese. Keywords: Igbo, tones, Chinese DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/76-04 Publication date: February 28 th 2021

Polarity in a four-level tone language: tone features in Tenyidie

This paper reports a new kind of tone polarity, where the phenomenon is seen in a language with four level tones, Tenyidie (also known as Angami). I show that the polarity is in the features of the tones, i.e. at a subtonal level. The data also provide evidence that tones themselves can be broken down into smaller features. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the polarity pattern observed in the language is an epiphenomenon, a reflex of the Obligatory Contour Principle, not a phonological process in its own right. I show this with the help of a new type of tonal representation. Theoretical discussions of tone polarity have so far been almost entirely restricted to African tone systems, and to languages with just two tones. This paper brings into the discussion a Tibeto-Burman language with four tones.

Context Matters for Tone and Intonation Processing in Mandarin.

In tonal languages such as Mandarin, both lexical tone and sentence intonation are primarily signaled by F0. Their F0 encodings are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in congruency. The present study investigated how tone and intonation, with F0 encodings in conflict or in congruency, are processed and how semantic context may affect their processing. To this end, tone and intonation identification experiments were conducted in both semantically neutral and constraining contexts. Results showed that the overall performance of tone identification was better than that of intonation. Specifically, tone identification was seldom affected by intonation information irrespective of semantic contexts. However, intonation identification, particularly question intonation, was susceptible to the final lexical tone identity and affected by the semantic context. In the semantically neutral context, questions ending with a rising tone and a falling tone were equally difficult to identify. In the semantically constraining context, questions ending with a falling tone were much better identified than those ending with a rising tone. This perceptual asymmetry suggests that top-down information provided by the semantically constraining context can play a facilitating role for listeners to disentangle intonational information from tonal information, but mainly in sentences with the lexical falling tone in the final position.

Channel Interaction During Infrared Light Stimulation in the Cochlea.

The number of perceptually independent channels to encode acoustic information is limited in contemporary cochlear implants (CIs) because of the current spread in the tissue. It has been suggested that neighboring electrodes have to be separated in humans by a distance of more than 2 mm to eliminate significant overlap of the electric current fields and subsequent interaction between the channels. It has also been argued that an increase in the number of independent channels could improve CI user performance in challenging listening environments, such as speech in noise, tonal languages, or music perception. Optical stimulation has been suggested as an alternative modality for neural stimulation because it is spatially selective. This study reports the results of experiments designed to quantify the interaction between neighboring optical sources in the cochlea during stimulation with infrared radiation. In seven adult albino guinea pigs, a forward masking method was used to quantify the interaction between two neighboring optical sources during stimulation. Two optical fibers were placed through cochleostomies into the scala tympani of the basal cochlear turn. The radiation beams were directed towards different neuron populations along the spiral ganglion. Optically evoked compound action potentials were recorded for different radiant energies and distances between the optical fibers. The outcome measure was the radiant energy of a masker pulse delivered 3 milliseconds before a probe pulse to reduce the response evoked by the probe pulse by 3 dB. Results were compared for different distances between the fibers placed along the cochlea. The energy required to reduce the probe's response by 3 dB increased by 20.4 dB/mm and by 26.0 dB/octave. The inhibition was symmetrical for the masker placed basal to the probe (base-to-apex) and the masker placed apical to the probe (apex-to-base). The interaction between neighboring optical sources during infrared laser stimulation is less than the interaction between neighboring electrical contacts during electrical stimulation. Previously published data for electrical stimulation reported an average current spread in human and cat cochleae of 2.8 dB/mm. With the increased number of independent channels for optical stimulation, it is anticipated that speech and music performance will improve. Lasers Surg. Med. © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Combination of absolute pitch and tone language experience enhances lexical tone perception

Absolute pitch (AP), a unique ability to name or produce pitch without any reference, is known to be influenced by genetic and cultural factors. AP and tone language experience are both known to promote lexical tone perception. However, the effects of the combination of AP and tone language experience on lexical tone perception are currently not known. In the current study, using behavioral (Categorical Perception) and electrophysiological (Frequency Following Response) measures, we investigated the effect of the combination of AP and tone language experience on lexical tone perception. We found that the Cantonese speakers with AP outperformed the Cantonese speakers without AP on Categorical Perception and Frequency Following Responses of lexical tones, suggesting an additive effect due to the combination of AP and tone language experience. These findings suggest a role of basic sensory pre-attentive auditory processes towards pitch encoding in AP. Further, these findings imply a common mechanism underlying pitch encoding in AP and tone language perception.