Thai Tones Research Articles

Musical Advantage in Lexical Tone Perception Hinges on Musical Instrument

Different musical instruments have different pitch processing demands. However, correlational studies have seldom considered the role of musical instruments in music-to-language transfer. Addressing this research gap could contribute to a nuanced understanding of music-to-language transfer. To this end, we investigated whether pitched musicians had a unique musical advantage in lexical tone perception relative to unpitched musicians and nonmusicians. Specifically, we compared Cantonese pitched musicians, unpitched musicians, and nonmusicians on Thai tone discrimination and sequence recall. In the Thai tone discrimination task, the pitched musicians outperformed the unpitched musicians and the nonmusicians. Moreover, the unpitched musicians and the nonmusicians performed similarly. In the Thai tone sequence recall task, both pitched and unpitched musicians recalled level tone sequences more accurately than the nonmusicians, but the pitched musicians showed the largest musical advantage. However, the three groups recalled contour tone sequences with similar accuracy. Collectively, the pitched musicians had a unique musical advantage in lexical tone discrimination and the largest musical advantage in level tone sequence recall. From a theoretical perspective, this study offers correlational evidence for the Precision element of the OPERA hypothesis. The choice of musical instrumental may matter for music-to-language transfer in lexical tone discrimination and level tone sequence recall.

The boundary-induced modulation of obstruents and tones in Thai

Limited studies have suggested that tones can be strengthened in domain-initial positions, suggesting that domain-initial strengthening (DIS) effects in a tone language extend beyond the first segment of a prosodic domain. However, these studies have yielded unclear results. This study investigated whether DIS causes boundary-induced changes in tones. This study analyzed the maximum fundamental frequency (f0) of the falling, mid, and low tones in Thai along with acoustic measures of consonants, including the Voice Onset Times (VOTs) of /b/, /p/, and /pʰ/, frication duration of /f/, and consonant-induced f0 perturbation effects associated with these four consonants in domain-initial and domain-medial positions. Some evidence of DIS effects on tones was found, suggesting that DIS effects in a tone language can extend to tone production realized with the vowel that is beyond the first segment. Additionally, the VOTs of /b/, /p/, and /pʰ/ were more negative, unchanged, and longer, respectively, the frication of /f/ was longer, and f0 following /pʰ/ was raised in a domain-initial position compared to a domain-medial position. The findings contribute to the current understanding of the prosody-phonetics interface, particularly with respect to the relationship between DIS and the realization of tones.

The choice of musical instrument matters: Effect of pitched but not unpitched musicianship on tone identification and word learning

AbstractThe present study investigated the differential effects of pitched and unpitched musicianship on tone identification and word learning. We recruited 44 Cantonese-pitched musicians, unpitched musicians, and non-musicians. They completed a Thai tone identification task and seven sessions of Thai tone word learning. In the tone identification task, the pitched musicians outperformed the non-musicians but the unpitched musicians did not. In session 1 of the tone word learning task, the three groups showed similar accuracies. In session 7, the pitched musicians outperformed the non-musicians but the unpitched musicians did not. The results indicate that the musical advantage in tone identification and word learning hinges on pitched musicianship. From a theoretical perspective, these findings support the precision element of the OPERA hypothesis. Broadly, they reflect the need to consider the heterogeneity of musicianship when studying music-to-language transfer. Practically, the findings highlight the potential of pitched music training in enhancing tone word learning proficiency. Furthermore, the choice of musical instrument may matter to music-to-language transfer.

Does musicianship influence the perceptual integrality of tones and segmental information?

This study investigated the effect of musicianship on the perceptual integrality of tones and segmental information in non-native speech perception. We tested 112 Cantonese musicians, Cantonese non-musicians, English musicians, and English non-musicians with a modified Thai tone AX discrimination task. In the tone discrimination task, the control block only contained tonal variations, whereas the orthogonal block contained both tonal and task-irrelevant segmental variations. Relative to their own performance in the control block, the Cantonese listeners showed decreased sensitivity index (d') and increased response time in the orthogonal block, reflecting integral perception of tones and segmental information. By contrast, the English listeners performed similarly across the two blocks, indicating independent perception. Bayesian analysis revealed that the Cantonese musicians and the Cantonese non-musicians perceived Thai tones and segmental information equally integrally. Moreover, the English musicians and the English non-musicians showed similar degrees of independent perception. Based on the above results, musicianship does not seem to influence tone-segmental perceptual integrality. While musicianship apparently enhances tone sensitivity, not all musical advantages are transferrable to the language domain.

A Perception of Thai Tone in Chinese Students Using the Thai Tone Application: A Case Study of the Low Tone and the Falling Tone

The use of education applications in language learning is rapidly increasing. This research aims to analyse the tonal perception ability of Chinese students using the Thai Tone Application with minimal pairs approach. The participants were divided into two groups, an experimental group (ones who studied in the class and used the application) and a control group (ones who studied in the class without using the application), of 20 students each. One-syllable words bearing low tone and falling tone were used to examine the participants’ tonal perception ability. The findings revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in terms of differentiating between low tone and falling tone. The result of the current study furthur indicatesthe use of the mobile-assisted language learning applicationsince supplemental material may effectively enhance Thai tone perception or Thai tone learning outcomes in some Chinese students. The significance of the minimal pair approach is also discussed.

An acoustic and perception test of Chinese learning Thai with the Thai tone application

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of Thai tones produced by Chinese students learning Thai through the “Tone Application”, and conducts an attitude test towards the use of the Tone Application. A comparison of Thai tones pronounced by the participants with 40 native Thai speakers was also conducted. The acoustic characteristics studied in this research were the fundamental frequencies analyzed with the Praat program version 6.0.9. Statistical analysis such as mean, standard deviation, and t-test were used. The findings revealed that the Tone Application (a mobile phone application for practicing listening and speaking Thai) can partially promoted better tone pronunciation in Chinese students learning Thai as a foreign language. After utilizing the Thai Tone Application with the Chinese students, they could pronounce the mid, the low, the high, and the rising tones. However, the application failed to enhance falling tone which is linguistically classified as the problematic tone for Chinese students. In other words, the application helped expedite contour tones such as the high tone and the rising tone, but not the falling tone. It is questionable whether the application can replace the instructor or not. This study to also show another perspective on the acoustic study of Thai tones issues and another angle of students’ attitude towards the use of a language application.

Tone differentiation as a means for assessing non-native imitation of Thai tones by Mandarin speakers

Non-native tone production and imitation have been found to be phonetically deviant from native production for some discrete measures. However, it remains unresolved whether non-native imitation differs from native production in terms of the differentiation of tones in acoustic tone space. 32 native Mandarin speakers who had no experience with Thai imitated five Thai tones, and each participant produced 160 tokens in total under differing memory load and stimulus variability conditions to determine effects of cognitive demands. We calculated two tone differentiation indices (i.e., Index 1: tone differentiation within the tonal space; Index 2: differentiation among tones, both as in Barry & Blamey, 2004) based on F0 onset and F0 offset for Thai tones and the non-native imitations of these Thai tones by Mandarin imitators. There was a significant memory load by vowel variability interaction for Index 1 and a main effect of talker variability and a three-way interaction (memory load “talker variability” vowel variability) for Index 2, suggesting that tone differentiation is affected by cognitive factors. Nonetheless, non-native tone imitations were not significantly different from native productions on either index, indicating that non-native imitation resembles native production in terms of tone differentiation in an onset-offset F0 space.

Applying a Newly Learned Second Language Dimension to the Unknown: The Influence of Second Language Mandarin Tones on the Naïve Perception of Thai Tones

Abstract This study investigates whether L2 Mandarin learners can generalize experience with Mandarin tones to unfamiliar tones (i.e., Thai). Three language groups – L1 English/ L2 Mandarin learners (n=18), L1 Mandarin speakers (n=30), L1 monolingual English speakers (n=23) – were tested on the perception of unfamiliar Thai tones on ABX tasks. L2 Mandarin learners and L1 Mandarin speakers perceived Thai tones more accurately than L1 English non-learners. Mandarin learners L1 speakers showed priming on Mandarin tones on a lexical decision task with repetition priming, suggesting L2 tones had been encoded within lexical representations of L2 Mandarin words. However, results must be interpreted cautiously, with an absence of expected priming and presence of unexpected priming. In sum, learners can transfer L2 tone experience to unfamiliar tones, expanding the Feature Hypothesis (McAllister, Flege, & Piske, 2002) to include L2 influence as well. In addition, results indicate a potential disconnect between perception and encoding.

An acoustic view of the local Thai “Lae” reading and singing

This paper explores the acoustic characteristics of the local Thai “Lae” reading, as opposed to the singing one. The so-called “Lae /laeae/” with the contents based on the local Thai culture has been the traditional Thai singing for centuries and has been enculturated only within the families of professional vocalists. In this paper, an acoustic study was conducted. Two professional Thai vocalists (one female and one male) were asked to read aloud and sing two Lae songs: the gac song (n = 236 syllables) and the song of the Mahasawat Canal (n = 272 syllables). There were a total of 2032 tokens (508 syllables X 2 speakers X 2 types). All the tokens were digitally recorded in a sound-proof room and acoustically analyzed in the Praat program. The results revealed that, in singing, the vowel duration and the final sonorants (if any) were two-three times longer; the vowels and diphthongs were lower (with higher F1); and the F0 levels for Thai tones were higher than the reading counterparts. Additionally, in vocalization, both female and male vocalists inserted extra syllables and glottalization while singing. It is hoped that this acoustic study will help glocalize and preserve the local Thai Lae singing.

Crosslinguistic trends in tone change

AbstractGround-breaking studies on how Bangkok Thai tones have changed over the past 100 years (Pittayaporn 2007,2018;Zhu et al. 2015) reveal a pattern thatZhu et al. (2015)term the “clockwise tone shift cycle:” low > falling > high level or rising-falling > rising > falling-rising or low. The present study addresses three follow-up questions: (1) Are tone changes like those seen in Bangkok Thai also attested in other languages? (2) What other tone changes are repeated across multiple languages? (3) What phonetic biases are most likely to be the origins of the reported changes? A typological review of 52 tone change studies across 45 Sinitic, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Tibeto-Burman languages reveals that clockwise changes are by far the most common. The paper concludes by exploring how tonal truncation (Xu 2017) generates synchronic variation that matches the diachronic patterns; this suggests that truncation is a key mechanism in tone change.

Perception of nonnative tonal contrasts by Mandarin-English and English-Mandarin sequential bilinguals.

This study examined the role of acquisition order and crosslinguistic similarity in influencing transfer at the initial stage of perceptually acquiring a tonal third language (L3). Perception of tones in Yoruba and Thai was tested in adult sequential bilinguals representing three different first (L1) and second language (L2) backgrounds: L1 Mandarin-L2 English (MEBs), L1 English-L2 Mandarin (EMBs), and L1 English-L2 intonational/non-tonal (EIBs). MEBs outperformed EMBs and EIBs in discriminating L3 tonal contrasts in both languages, while EMBs showed a small advantage over EIBs on Yoruba. All groups showed better overall discrimination in Thai than Yoruba, but group differences were more robust in Yoruba. MEBs' and EMBs' poor discrimination of certain L3 contrasts was further reflected in the L3 tones being perceived as similar to the same Mandarin tone; however, EIBs, with no knowledge of Mandarin, showed many of the same similarity judgments. These findings thus suggest that L1 tonal experience has a particularly facilitative effect in L3 tone perception, but there is also a facilitative effect of L2 tonal experience. Further, crosslinguistic perceptual similarity between L1/L2 and L3 tones, as well as acoustic similarity between different L3 tones, play a significant role at this early stage of L3 tone acquisition.

Coupling tonetics and perceptual attunement: The psychophysics of lexical tone contrast salience

As with the coupling phonetics and psycholinguistics by such luminaries as Sereno and Jongman, we couple (a) discrepant cross-lab results in infant lexical tone perceptual attunement studies and (b) an adult cross-language lexical tone perception study. Three trajectories of lexical tone perception over infants’ first year have been found over labs, in which infants from differing language backgrounds have been tested with differing stimulus materials, viz., (i) Incremental (Singh’s lab—Singaporean Mandarin vs Singaporean English language background infants, Singaporean Mandarin tone contrasts; Tsao’s lab-Taiwanese and English language infants, Taiwanese Mandarin contrasts); (ii) Decremental (Burnham’s lab—Australian English but not for Cantonese or Mandarin language infants, Thai contrasts; Yeung/Werker’s lab—American English but not for Mandarin and Cantonese language infants, Cantonese contrasts); and (iii) U-shaped (Kager’s lab—Dutch infants, Mainland Mandarin contrasts). To investigate these discrepancies, we tested discrimination of Singaporean Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, Hong Kong Cantonese, and Bangkok Thai tone contrasts by Singaporean Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, Hong Kong Cantonese, Bangkok Thai, and Sydney Australian English listeners. Despite some discrepancies, this coupling revealed some congruences between psychophysical level of difficulty of tone contrasts within and between languages in the adult study, and the different developmental trajectories in the infant studies.

Constraints on Tone Sensitivity in Novel Word Learning by Monolingual and Bilingual Infants: Tone Properties Are More Influential than Tone Familiarity.

This study compared tone sensitivity in monolingual and bilingual infants in a novel word learning task. Tone language learning infants (Experiment 1, Mandarin monolingual; Experiment 2, Mandarin-English bilingual) were tested with Mandarin (native) or Thai (non-native) lexical tone pairs which contrasted static vs. dynamic (high vs. rising) tones or dynamic vs. dynamic (rising vs. falling) tones. Non-tone language, English-learning infants (Experiment 3) were tested on English intonational contrasts or the Mandarin or Thai tone contrasts. Monolingual Mandarin language infants were able to bind tones to novel words for the Mandarin High-Rising contrast, but not for the Mandarin Rising-Falling contrast; and they were insensitive to both the High-Rising and the Rising-Falling tone contrasts in Thai. Bilingual English-Mandarin infants were similar to the Mandarin monolinguals in that they were sensitive to the Mandarin High-Rising contrast and not to the Mandarin Rising-Falling contrast. However, unlike the Mandarin monolinguals, they were also sensitive to the High Rising contrast in Thai. Monolingual English learning infants were insensitive to all three types of contrasts (Mandarin, Thai, English), although they did respond differentially to tone-bearing vs. intonation-marked words. Findings suggest that infants' sensitivity to tones in word learning contexts depends heavily on tone properties, and that this influence is, in some cases, stronger than effects of language familiarity. Moreover, bilingual infants demonstrated greater phonological flexibility in tone interpretation.

Tonal Perception Ability of Thai Children with Cochlear Implants and Hearing Aids

Background: Thai is one of several tonal languages. Accordingly, words spoken with different tones will change their meaning. Sensorineural hearing loss children have difficulty in perceiving tones which is directly related to a low level of speech understanding and intelligibility.Objectives: This study compared the tonal perception ability of severe-to-profound hearing loss children and profound hearing loss children who used hearing aids and cochlear implants respectively.Material and methods: Sixteen pre-lingual sensorineural hearing loss children from a preschoolaural rehabilitation program at Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University, were selected. Subjects consisted of 8 bilateral hearing aid children and 8 unilateral cochlear implant children who were trained in the program for more than 3 years and able to produce speech recognition scores. All subjects demonstrated reasonable aided responses with their hearing devices. A Thai tone identification and discrimination test was used in this study. These tests were conducted by an experienced audiologist in a quiet room. The scores of the hearing aid group and the cochlear implant group were compared.Results: There were significant differences in tonal identification scores and tonal discrimination scores for the cochlear implant group when compared to the hearing aid group (p<0.05)Conclusion: Cochlear implantation provided better tonal perception of Thai lexical tone identification and discrimination of profound hearing loss children than severe-to-profound hearing loss children who used bilateral hearing aids.

Non-native perception of Vietnamese tone contrasts

A listener’s ability to discriminate non-native sound contrasts has been shown to be largely influenced by the listener's native phonological system (Best et al., 2003; Tyler et al., 2014; Tskuda, 2012). Looking specifically at suprasegmental contrasts, experimental results suggest that the degree to which pitch is used to distinguish lexical items in a speaker’s L1 influences how well they are able to detect non-native tone contrasts (Schaefer & Darcy, 2014). However, these results are based only on Thai tones. The present study shows that native speakers of English (a stress language), and Mandarin (a tone language) do not perform significantly differently in their ability to perceive Vietnamese tone contrasts. Results from an ABX categorization task show that native speakers of English are not more likely to make errors in categorizing Vietnamese tones than native speakers of Mandarin, and both groups have difficulty perceiving the difference between the low falling tone and the low falling-rising tone...

Mandarin Chinese Tonal Acquisition by Thai Speakers

The aim of the present empirical study is two-fold. The first aim is to investigate why Thai university students perceive a certain tone better than others or why a certain tone is more difficult to perceive than others. The second aim is to examine to what extent Thai university students can perceive four Chinese Mandarin tones. 14 volunteer university students (2 males; 12 females) participated in the study. Research tools were structured interview and the perception test. The findings from the interview reveal that 9 out of 14 (64%) students claimed that tone 4 was the easiest tone either to perceive or produce. In contrast, 10 out of 14 (71%) stated that tone 3 was the most difficult one to perceive. The qualitative data findings from the interview were greatly consistent with the quantitative data ones from the perception test. That is, Thai speakers performed well in tone 4 (mean scores 24.92 or 99.68%) and tone 1 (24.35 or 97.40%). On the other end of the scale, they had some difficulty identifying tone 2 (21.42 or 85.68%) and tone 3 (19.50 or 78%). It can be concluded that firstly, the hierarchy of tone accessibility from the least difficult to the most difficult one was tone 4 &gt; tone 1 &gt; tone 2 &gt; tone 3. Secondly, students’ native language (Thai) or L1 plays a crucial role to their tonal acquisition when Thai speakers deal with foreign lexical tones. For one important reason, tones 1 and 4 in Chinese are very similar to the mid tone and the falling tone in Thai, respectively.

Thai Tones Produced by Tonal and Nontonal Language Speakers: An Acoustic Study

The purpose of this paper was to analyze the acoustic characteristics of Thai tones produced by tonal language speakers, namely Vietnamese and Burmese, and non-tonal language speakers, namely Khmer and Malay, in citation form and connected speech. The test words in citation form and connected speech comprised five tones, which were the Mid tone, the Low tone, the Falling tone, the High tone, and the Rising tone occurring in non-checked and checked syllables. The informants were twenty-four Vietnamese, Burmese, Khmer, and Malay native speakers with high experience in Thai (three speakers for each language) and low experience in Thai (three speakers for each language). The informants’ speech was recorded directly on to a computer. The fundamental frequencies (F0) of tones were measured using Praat Version 5.1.43 and then converted to semitones.

Tone-intonation interaction in context in Thai

The acoustic realization of lexical tone is influenced by sentence-level intonation. For example, F0 measurements show that a phonologically falling tone in Thai is warped when overlaid with a falling intonational contour, causing F0 to fall further and to begin its decline at an earlier timepoint than when influenced by other contours. This categorical perception study, which includes both identification and discrimination tasks, uses a nine-step continuum of target words created with naturally produced lexical tone endpoints, presented within two different naturally produced sentence frames. Specifically, these tasks investigate the perception of high and falling tones in sentence-medial and sentence-final positions in Thai. This test of stimulus continua within natural sentence contexts reveals the listeners’ context-mediated perception of deviation from a canonical lexical tone, shedding light on the interaction and relative weights of both tone and intonation perception in natural speech, and also offering insight into the mechanism with which language users process suprasegmental information.

Naïve Learners Show Cross-Domain Transfer after Distributional Learning: The Case of Lexical and Musical Pitch.

Experienced listeners of a particular acoustic cue in either speech or music appear to have an advantage when perceiving a similar cue in the other domain (i.e., they exhibit cross-domain transfer). One explanation for cross-domain transfer relates to the acquisition of the foundations of speech and music: if acquiring pitch-based elements in speech or music results in heightened attention to pitch in general, then cross-domain transfer of pitch may be observed, which may explain the cross-domain phenomenon seen among listeners of a tone language and listeners with musical training. Here, we investigate this possibility in naïve adult learners, who were trained to acquire pitch-based elements using a distributional learning paradigm, to provide a proof-of-concept for the explanation. Learners were exposed to a stimulus distribution spanning either a Thai lexical tone minimal pair or a novel musical chord minimal pair. Within each domain, the distribution highlights pitch to facilitate learning of two different sounds (Bimodal distribution) or the distribution minimizes pitch so that the input is inferred to be from a single sound (Unimodal distribution). Learning was assessed before and after exposure to the distribution using discrimination tasks with both Thai tone and musical chord minimal pairs. We hypothesize: (i) distributional learning for learners in both the tone and the chord distributions, that is, pre-to-post improvement in discrimination after exposure to the Bimodal but not the Unimodal distribution; and (ii) for both the tone and chord conditions, learners in the Bimodal conditions but not those in the Unimodal conditions will show cross-domain transfer, as indexed by improvement in discrimination of test items in the domain other than what they were trained on. The results support both hypotheses, suggesting that distributional learning is not only used to acquire the foundations of speech and music, but may also play a role in cross-domain transfer: as a result of learning primitives based on a particular cue, learners show heightened attention to that cue in any auditory signal.

A computational classification of Thai lexical tones

The leveling of contour tones in Thai, uttered in a continuous context, has served as a natural point of difficulty for tone recognition experiments. Two tone recognition experiments presented here both include five lexical Thai tones (high, mid, low, rising, and falling) as abstract Bayesian models incorporated into a multi-model Hidden Markov Model. The HMM was developed using Thai natural language utterances to test its performance in correctly identifying Thai lexical tone categories. All utterances used for testing and training were produced in a laboratory setting. Utterances for the first experiment were produced in a citation context, and utterances for the second experiment were produced in a continuous context. The results of the two experiments were compared to test if the context had a significant effect on correctly identifying tone category. Findings showed the context of the utterance had a significant effect on the HMM’s ability to correctly identify tone category, F(1,48) = 5.82, p = 0.02...