Tonal Language Research Articles

The effect of tone language background on cue integration in pitch perception.

This study explores the effect of native language and musicality on voice quality cue integration in pitch perception. Previous work by Cui and Kang [(2019). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146(6), 4086-4096] found no differences in pitch perception strategies between English and Mandarin speakers. The present study asks whether Cantonese listeners may perform differently, as Cantonese consists of multiple level tones. Participants completed two experiments: (i) a forced choice pitch classification experiment involving four spectral slope permutations that vary in fo across an 11 step continuum, and (ii) the MBEMA test that quantifies listeners' musicality. Results show that Cantonese speakers do not differ from English and Mandarin speakers in terms of overall categoricity and perceptual shift, that Cantonese speakers do not have advantages in musicality, and that musicality is a significant predictor for participants' pitch perception strategies. Listeners with higher musicality scores tend to rely more on fo cues than voice quality cues compared to listeners with lower musicality. These findings support the notion that voice quality integration in pitch perception is not language specific, and may be a universal psychoacoustic phenomenon at a non-lexical level.

越南学生汉语习得中的声母偏误分析

学习汉语的越南人不断增多。与其他国家的学生相比，越南学生更有学习汉语的优势。之所以这样说是因为在词汇方面越南语受了汉语的很大影响；语法方面跟汉语也很相似；再说，越南语也是有声调的一种语言。但另一方面，由于汉语与越南语只是相似，而并不完全相同，因此，越南学生学习起来也难免出现各种各样的偏误。而在越南学生的各种偏误中，笔者们认为语音偏误最为明显。特别是在越南学生对汉语声母的习得中,越南语的干扰对发音的影响最明显。因此，笔者试图进行调查研究，找出偏误的规律，并运用理论基础来对偏误进行解释，从而探讨偏误的成因，以便找出克服的方案以及提出教学建议。More and more Vietnamese are learning Chinese. Compared with students from other countries, Vietnamese students have more advantages in learning Chinese. This is because Vietnamese has been heavily influenced by Chinese in terms of vocabulary; The grammar is also very similar to Chinese; Besides, Vietnamese is a tonal language. But on the other hand, because Chinese and Vietnamese are only similar, but not exactly the same, so Vietnamese students will inevitably appear a variety of errors in learning. Among all kinds of errors of Vietnamese students, the authors think phonetic errors are the most obvious. Especially in the acquisition of Chinese initials by Vietnamese students, Vietnamese interference has the most obvious influence on pronunciation. Therefore, the author tries to conduct investigation and research to find out the law of the bias, and use the theoretical basis to explain the bias, so as to explore the causes of the bias, in order to find out the solution and put forward teaching suggestions.

Lexical tonal effects in code-switching: A comparative study of Cantonese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese switching with English

Aims and objectives: Previous research has revealed much about the syntactic and social variables conditioning code-switching (i.e., the alternation between two or more languages in a discourse or utterance); however, little is known about the phonological effects. Our work explores this area by asking two main questions: (1) Does lexical tone affect code-switching between a tonal language and a non-tonal language? and (2) Is this effect (or lack thereof) observable cross-linguistically? Methodology: We examine natural code-switching production between Cantonese and English, Mandarin and English, and Vietnamese and English. We use a semi-automatic natural-language processing method to process and extract relevant variables, including tonal categories at switch points. Data and analysis: Data include transcribed natural speech from three bilingual corpora: the HLVC corpus (Cantonese/English, 25 speakers), the SEAME corpus (Mandarin/English, 20 speakers), and the CanVEC corpus (Vietnamese/English, 45 speakers). We use logistic mixed-effects models to examine tonal effects, taking into account other factors such as frequency and grammatical category. Findings/conclusion: We found a robust tonal effect in Cantonese/English, a less robust effect in Mandarin/English, and no effect in Vietnamese/English. This indicates there is a tonal effect in code-switching between a tonal and a non-tonal language, but this effect is language-dependent. We also found a specific T3 ‘step-up’ pattern at Cantonese-English switch points and offered some possible phonological explanations. Originality: This is the first study that systematically investigates tonal effects in code-switching across different language pairs, using comparable data and methods. Our finding of a Cantonese-English T3 ‘step-up’ pattern is also a novel discovery that hitherto has not been documented. Significance/implications: Theoretically, our findings support Clyne’s ‘facilitation theory’ in code-switching at a prosodic level. Empirically, we nevertheless emphasised the complexity of different prosodic features and social variables in play, thereby rejecting the idea of ‘predicting’ code-switching solely based on linguistic factors.

Using a forced aligner for prosody research

Forced alignment is a speech technique that can automatically align audio files with transcripts. With the help of forced alignment tools, annotating audio files and creating annotated speech databases have become much more accessible and efficient. Researchers have recently started to evaluate the benefits and accuracy of forced aligners in speech research and have provided insightful suggestions for improvement. However, current work has so far paid little attention to evaluating forced aligners in prosody research, which focuses on suprasegmental features. In this paper, we take ambiguous sentence-level audio input in Mandarin Chinese, which can be disambiguated prosodically, to evaluate the alignment accuracy of the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA). With a satisfactory result for syllable-by-syllable alignment, we further explore the possibility and benefits of using the forced alignment tool to generate phrase-by-phrase alignment. This topic has barely been studied in previous research on forced alignment. Our paper demonstrates that the forced alignment tool can effectively generate accurate alignment at both syllable and phrase levels for tonal languages, such as Mandarin. We found that the average differences between human annotators and MFA were smaller than the gold standard, indicating a satisfactory level of performance by the tool. Moreover, the MFA-assisted annotation rate by human transcribers was at least 20 times faster than previously reported manual annotation efficiency, providing significant time and resource savings for prosody researchers. Our results also suggest that phrase-level alignment accuracy of MFA can be affected by the quality of the recording, calling prosody researchers’ attention to controlling the audio quality in the recording. The finding that de-stressed words/phrases pose challenges for MFA also provides a reference for improving forced aligners.

Phylogenetic insight into the origin of tones.

The origin of tone, also known as tonogenesis, has long been a topic of great interest in language evolution and human cognition studies. Several linguistic studies of tonal languages have proposed various hypotheses that tonal origin may be related to different changes of phonological structures. However, such hypotheses have not been quantitatively tested in an evolutionary framework. Here, we conducted phylogenetic comparative analyses to assess the likelihood of different hypotheses of tonogenetic mechanisms across 106 Sino-Tibetan languages, of which approximately 70% are tonal. Our results showed that the presence of tones has a strong phylogenetic pattern and that Proto-Sino-Tibetan languages were most likely non-tonal. Our findings identified that tonal origin was strongly associated with the evolution of specific phonological structures, such as the loss of syllable-final consonants and voice quality on vowels. Furthermore, we found that tonal origin probably did not influence the diversification rates of Sino-Tibetan languages. These findings enabled us to better understand that tone arose as a compensatory mechanism for the structural organization and evolution of languages.

The form and function processing of lexical tone and intonation in tone-language-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder.

Studies on how the form versus function aspect of tone and intonation is processed by autistic individuals have mainly focused on speakers of non-tonal languages (e.g., English) with equivocal results. While the samples' heterogeneous cognitive abilities may be contributing factors, the phenotype of tone and intonation processing in autism may also vary with one's language background. Thirty-eight cognitively able autistic and 32 non-autistic Mandarin-speaking children completed tone and intonation perception tasks, each containing a function and form condition. Results suggested that the abilities to discriminate tone and intonation were not impaired at either the form or function level in these autistic children, and that these abilities were positively associated with one another in both autistic and non-autistic groups. The more severe the autism symptoms, the worse the form- and function-level of tone and intonation processing. While enhanced tone and intonation processing has been found in a subgroup of autistic children, it may not be a general characteristic of the autistic population with long-term tone language experience. These findings reveal typical tone and intonation processing at both the form and function levels in cognitively able Mandarin-speaking autistic children and provide evidence for associated tone and intonation processing abilities across levels.

Tone, stress, and their interactions in Cushillococha Ticuna

Ticuna (ISO: tca; Peru, Colombia, Brazil) displays a larger tone inventory – five level tones – than any other Indigenous American language outside Oto-Manguean. Based on recent fieldwork, this article argues that, in addition to these tone properties, the Cushillococha variety of Ticuna also displays stress. Stress corresponds to morphological structure, licenses additional tonal and segmental contrasts, conditions many phonological processes, and plays a central role in grammatical tone processes marking clause type. Empirically, these findings expand our understanding of word prosody in tone languages in general and Amazonian languages in particular. Theoretically, they challenge current models of stress-conditioned phonology and grammatical tone.

Small Powers, Geopolitical Crisis and Hypersecuritisation: Latvia and the Effects of Russia’s Second War in Ukraine

This article presents a case where securitisation of one state in another increased dramatically and exponentially. The scale and intensity of securitisation were unprecedented, as were the range of securitisation actors, and the tone of language of speech acts and nonverbal securitisation acts. This case in question is the securitisation of Russia in Latvia over Russia’s war in Ukraine starting in 2022. Although Russia was securitised by its smaller neighbour before the war, the sudden explosion of securitisation in 2022 differs from any securitisation in recent decades there. Securitisation of Russia is evaluated within the margins of the hypersecuritisation subconcept that purports securitisation beyond the ‘normal’ level, characterised by exaggeration of threats and excessive countermeasures. This article offers a reformulation of the subconcept, omitting the negative connotation built into the initial definition, as well as addresses the transition from securitisation to hypersecuritisation.

Tone Language Teaching Assitant Model

The study for the tonal languages has always been an important issue in the field of the linguistics. How to improve the efficiency of language learning and provide learners with appropriate feedback in time is worthy of attention. In this paper, the research aims to design an automatic system or application to help users learn the tones they pronounce in order to improve their learning efficiency relative to manual teaching. The user will first select the proficiency level, and the system will provide corresponding sentences for learners to read. Learners will have three buttons to choose from: read the sentence, ask for a prompt, or just skip. If the learner mispronounces the sentence, the app will automatically mark the word the learner mispronounces in red and provide the correct pronunciation. The general framework and the corresponding example results were also provided in this study. Such a system has a potential to be applied in the real life.

Decoding and synthesizing tonal language speech from brain activity.

Recent studies have shown that the feasibility of speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) as a clinically valid treatment in helping nontonal language patients with communication disorders restore their speech ability. However, tonal language speech BCI is challenging because additional precise control of laryngeal movements to produce lexical tones is required. Thus, the model should emphasize the features from the tonal-related cortex. Here, we designed a modularized multistream neural network that directly synthesizes tonal language speech from intracranial recordings. The network decoded lexical tones and base syllables independently via parallel streams of neural network modules inspired by neuroscience findings. The speech was synthesized by combining tonal syllable labels with nondiscriminant speech neural activity. Compared to commonly used baseline models, our proposed models achieved higher performance with modest training data and computational costs. These findings raise a potential strategy for approaching tonal language speech restoration.

Intrinsic vowel pitch in Hamont Dutch: Evidence for If0 reduction in the lower pitch range

This study investigated Intrinsic Vowel Pitch (If0) in the Belgian Limburg dialect of Hamont. Its main aim was to investigate a potential correlation between If0 and f0, which has been attested in previous research, especially on contour tone languages. The Hamont dialect is particularly interesting because it has a pitch accent distinction, but also because the vowel system has a high and low vowel contrast in the front and the back dimension of the vowel space. The results of this study are generally compatible with If0 research on many languages but adds some new insights. Firstly, it was found that If0 in the Hamont dialect is comparatively large (1.97 semitones). Secondly, it was confirmed that the front–back distinction in vowel articulation has no significant effect on If0. Thirdly, when If0 is expressed on a semitone scale, no significant differences in If0 were found between male and female speakers of the dialect. The most important finding of the paper is the significant positive correlation between f0 and If0 in that If0 is smaller in the lower pitch range and bigger in the higher pitch range. This phenomenon in Hamont Dutch is much the same to what is observed in contour tone languages that have been examined for this. There are indications that a similar tendency exists in register tone languages and intonation languages. Although the cause of this progressive If0 reduction is not entirely clear, its wide distribution across prosodic systems seems to point towards a universal tendency.

Perception of grammatical tone in Akan patients with left and right hemisphere brain damage

ABSTRACT It remains a matter of debate what roles the left and right hemispheres play in processing speech prosody. Brain lesion studies have demonstrated that lexical tone perception among native speakers of tonal languages is more disrupted in left hemisphere damaged (LHD) individuals than right hemisphere damaged (RHD) individuals. This has been taken to suggest that linguistically-relevant prosodic cues are predominantly left-lateralised, whereas non-linguistic stimuli are predominantly right-lateralised. However, this phenomenon has only been examined in lexical tone, leaving grammatical tone perception unexplored. The aim of this study was twofold: Firstly, to examine how individuals with LHD and RHD perceive grammatical tone, and secondly to compare grammatical tone to non-linguistic tone perception. Therefore, native Akan speakers with LHD, RHD and no-brain damage (NBD) controls were tested in two discrimination tasks that examined linguistic and non-linguistic tone perception. The results showed that while both the individuals with LHD and RHD show impairment in grammatical tone perception, there was a trend of a better performance for the RHD group. Nonetheless, for non-linguistic tone perception, individuals with LHD outperformed the RHD individuals, although both had reduced performance compared to the NBD individuals. A further analysis revealed that the reduced perceptual abilities of both the LHD and RHD groups in grammatical tone perception can be attributed to grammatical problems rather than tone per se. We conclude that there is potentially a bilateral involvement of the two hemispheres in grammatical tone processing, with the left being the dominant hemisphere.

Tone Deafness in Music Does Not Preclude Distributional Learning of Nonnative Tonal Languages in Individuals With Congenital Amusia.

Previous studies have shown that individuals with congenital amusia exhibit deficient pitch processing across music and language domains. This study investigated whether adult Chinese-speaking listeners with amusia were still able to learn Thai lexical tones based on stimulus frequency of statistical distribution via distributional learning, despite their degraded lexical tone perception. Following a pretest-training-posttest design, 21 amusics and 23 typical, musically intact listeners were assigned into bimodal and unimodal distribution conditions. Listeners were asked to discriminate minimal pairs of Thai mid-level tone and falling tone superimposed on variable base syllables and uttered by different speakers. The perceptual accuracy for each test session and improvement from pretest to posttest were collected and analyzed between the two groups using generalized mixed-effects models. When discriminating Thai lexical tones, amusics were less accurate than typical listeners. Nonetheless, similarly to control listeners, perceptual gains from pretest to posttest were observed in bimodally rather than unimodally trained amusics, as evidenced by both trained and nontrained test words. Amusics are able to learn lexical tones in a second or foreign context of speech. This extends previous research by showing that amusics' distributional learning of linguistic pitch remains largely preserved despite their degraded pitch processing. It is thus likely that manifestations of amusia in speech could not result from their abnormal statistical learning mechanism. This study meanwhile provides a heuristic approach for future studies to apply this paradigm into amusics' treatment to mitigate their pitch-processing disorder.

Understanding the Urhobo Tonal Structure through Constraint-Based Framework

Urhobo is a southwest Edoid language spoken in southern Nigeria. Its tonal patterns have been studied, but from a descriptive perspective, which, from a theoretical standpoint, potentially limits the understanding that tonal deviations from underlying forms are essentially due to resolutions of conflicts between some competing constraints. This study adopts the Optimality Theory (OT) to reveal the competing universal constraints: IDENT-T, MAX-T; NoFUSION; LINEARITY; DISASSOC; ALIGN-R CONTOUR; OCP; SPECIFY-T; *FLOAT; and NoCONTOUR. The study shows that these constraints crucially govern the Urhobo tonal patterns such as (i) downstep; (ii) single multiply-linked high (H) tone; (iii) single multiply-linked low (L) tone; (iv) boundary H.H and L.L tones fusion; (v); H-tone preservation; (vi) LH-tone preservation; (vii) floating H tone; and, (viii) final HL contour tone. Moreover, it highlights two Urhobo -specific tonal alternations listed in (v) and (vi), which exhibit preservation of H and LH tones at the expense of L tone, post-lexically. Consequently, it proposes four markedness constraints NoH.L-T, NoL.H-T, NoH.LH-T, and NoL. to explain the preservation effects. Our findings support phonologists’ view that, cross-linguistically, universal (and language-specific) constraints are those that motivate tonal deviations from input forms in tone languages, and that minimally marked tonal outputs are the result of markedness dominance over faithfulness.

Effects of English Proficiency on Chinese Students Recognition and Pronunciation of English Lexical Stress

English is a stress-timed language, stress is very important in English. However, Chinese is a tonal language, which leads to pronunciation difficulties for Chinese students in learning English. This study studies the recognition and production of English lexical stress by Chinese students who are not English majors and the factors that may affect stress assignments. Eight students between the ages of 18-22 (four males and four females) who have passed CET 6 will be tested, including a phonetic quiz and a listening test. Four kinds of vocabularies were selected as research materials: Polysyllabic Word, Word with Affixes, Compound Word, and Homograph. Results indicate that: (1) For non-English major students, the correlation between English proficiency and lexical stress is not high, but is mostly affected by personal reading habits; (2) Students know very little about the word stress. They identify and pronounce stress relying on their personal habits.

Tone Languages Effect on Emotional Detective Music

We already know tone language has different tones, but non-tone language does not. Music can cause our emotions to change. According to the relationship between languages and music, music and emotions, we want to design a study that uses the reaction of Autonomic Nervous System(ANS), especially the part of Heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and electrometal activity (EDA) to detect the emotional arousal caused by joyful pleasant music, isochronous tones, and unpleasant control stimuli. The main purpose of the test is that to see if there are some differences from the sensitivity of music caused emotional changes between tone language speakers and non-tone language speakers. Also, further aim is to determine whether music therapy for different language speakers should be detailed to different frequency pitches changed music.

Contrastive Analysis of the Characteristics of Vietnamese Words with Hmong Language ones and Reasons for Making Mistakes in Using Vietnamese words of Hmong Primary School Pupils

Vietnamese and Hmong languages are both isolated, syllabic, and tonal languages. However, Vietnamese words and Hmong language words have similar and different characteristics. Therefore, we have analyzed and contrasted the characteristics of Vietnamese words with Hmong language ones, analyzing language interferences that are the causes of errors in using Vietnamese words of Hmong primary school pupils. This research aims to contribute to improving the quality of Vietnamese language teaching for Hmong primary school pupils in primary schools in Vietnam ethnic minority and mountainous areas.

Regulatory enforcement, foreignness, and language negativity: Evidence from SEC comment letters

In this paper, we demonstrate that negative language is employed as a mechanism through which regulators express their differentiated level of concern and pass on stronger messages to riskier reviewees. We investigate the language tone employed by the internationally-influential United States (US) Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in comment letters to foreign firms, which are considered riskier in comparison with their US domestic counterparts. We find a significantly greater level of language negativity in comment letters addressed to foreign registrants. We further show that the negativity of language is more intense when foreign firms are domiciled in strong-law countries and when they do not apply US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). We offer implications for regulators, managers, and market participants.

Language and music: Singing voices and music talent

Native speakers of tonal languages show enhanced musical melody perception but diminished rhythm abilities. This effect has now been rigorously demonstrated in a new study that tested the musical IQ of half a million human participants across the globe.

Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of fifty-four languages

Tonal languages differ from other languages in their use of pitch (tones) to distinguish words. Lifelong experience speaking and hearing tonal languages has been argued to shape auditory processing in ways that generalize beyond the perception of linguistic pitch to the perception of pitch in other domains like music. We conducted a meta-analysis of prior studies testing this idea, finding moderate evidence supporting it. But prior studies were limited by mostly small sample sizes representing a small number of languages and countries, making it challenging to disentangle the effects of linguistic experience from variability in music training, cultural differences, and other potential confounds. To address these issues, we used web-based citizen science to assess music perception skill on a global scale in 34,034 native speakers of 19 tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin, Yoruba). We compared their performance to 459,066 native speakers of other languages, including 6 pitch-accented (e.g., Japanese) and 29 non-tonal languages (e.g., Hungarian). Whether or not participants had taken music lessons, native speakers of all 19 tonal languages had an improved ability to discriminate musical melodies on average, relative to speakers of non-tonal languages. But this improvement came with a trade-off: tonal language speakers were also worse at processing the musical beat. The results, which held across native speakers of many diverse languages and were robust to geographic and demographic variation, demonstrate that linguistic experience shapes music perception, with implications for relations between music, language, and culture in the human mind.