A Study on Implementation of Southern-Min Taiwanese Tone Sandhi System

PACLIC 19 / Taipei, taiwan / December 1-3, 200

Tone Sandhi Phenomena In Taiwan Southern Min

This dissertation investigates various aspects of the tone sandhi phenomena in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM). Previous studies have reported complete tonal neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants derived respectively from citation 55 and 24 variants, leading to the claim that tone sandhi in this language is categorical. The fact that tone sandhi in TSM is assumed to possess a mixture of properties of lexical and postlexical rules gives rise to the debate over the status of this phonological rule. The findings of the dissertation shows incomplete neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants with an indication of an ongoing sound change towards a near- or complete tonal merger, possibly led by female speakers. In addition, citation form is proposed to be more underlyingly represented on account of the fact that subjects, especially old speakers, have stronger association with citation variants than with sandhi variants in the priming experiment. The spontaneous corpus study suggests that the Tone Circle is merely a phonological idealization in light of the systematic subphonemic difference in f0 between citation X and sandhi X that are supposed to correspond even with some control of conceivable confounding factors. By comparing direct- and indirect-reference models, I argue that tone sandhi in TSM should be analyzed as a head-left Concatenation rule within a DM-based theoretical framework

Evaluating Self-supervised Speech Models on a Taiwanese Hokkien Corpus

Taiwanese Hokkien is declining in use and status due to a language shift towards Mandarin in Taiwan. This is partly why it is a low resource language in NLP and speech research today. To ensure that the state of the art in speech processing does not leave Taiwanese Hokkien behind, we contribute a 1.5-hour dataset of Taiwanese Hokkien to ML-SUPERB's hidden set. Evaluating ML-SUPERB's suite of self-supervised learning (SSL) speech representations on our dataset, we find that model size does not consistently determine performance. In fact, certain smaller models outperform larger ones. Furthermore, linguistic alignment between pretraining data and the target language plays a crucial role.Comment: Accepted to ASRU 202

The productivity of tone sandhi patterns in Wuxi Chinese

The complex tone sandhi patterns of Chinese dialects present analytical challenges to theoretical phonology, and productivity tests can help us address the issue from another perspective. Previous studies have shown that sandhi productivity is negatively affected by phonological opacity, positively affected by clear phonetic motivations, and positively correlated with lexical frequency of the sandhi patterns. It is further argued that the phonological grammar of tone sandhi patterns includes both grammatical constraints and lexical listing. We complement this research endeavor with a sandhi pattern whose productivity has not been previously studied: pattern substitution in Wuxi Chinese. Pattern substitution in Wuxi is left-dominant, whereby the base tone of the first syllable is first replaced by another tone before being spread to the sandhi domain. As a first step towards understanding the productivity of the pattern, we focus on disyllabic combinations between the three Yin tones on non-checked syllables T1, T3, and T5. Twenty native Wuxi Chinese speakers produced four sets of stimuli, including one set of Actual-Occurring real words (AO-AO), two sets of novel words made up of Actual-Occurring morphemes (*AO-AO1, *AO-AO2), and one set of novel words composed of an Accidental-Gap syllable and an Actual-Occurring morpheme (AG-AO). The difference between *AO-AO1 and *AO-AO2 was that the first AO morpheme of *AO-AO1 occurs in the initial position of real disyllable words, while that of *AO-AO2 does not. Both acoustic and statistical analyses were conducted. The results show that speakers had no difficulty producing real words with the expected sandhi, but pattern substitution is not fully productive in novel words. AG-AO showed the lowest productivity, while there was no significant difference between *AO-AO1 and *AO-AO2. This indicates that speakers may have tonal allomorph listings for morphemes as well as for syllables of morphemes (*AO-AO2). When they could not find the syllables in real syllable listing (AG-AO), they tend to spread the base tone of the first syllable or do nothing. Moreover, T3 showed the highest substitution productivity, and the similarity between T3, a low rising tone, and its substitution, a high rising tone, is the highest. It suggests that speakers may rely more on phonetic similarity rather than lexical frequency in applying tone sandhi to novel words

Tone sandhi and tonal coarticulation in Fuzhou Min

This study examines the completeness of Fuzhou tonal neutralisation and its interaction with tonal coarticulation. In Fuzhou, Tone 44, 242 and 53 are allegedly neutralised into Tone 44 preceding Tone 53. Acoustic data, analysed with Linear Mixed Modelling, show no significant difference in pitch height between neutralised tones, suggesting complete neutralisation in production. A forcedchoice identification test reveals that Fuzhou speakers are unable to distinguish these neutralised tones perceptually. Further acoustic data show how the output of categorical tone sandhi may be modified by tonal coarticulation, with dissimilatory effects superimposed on the sandhi tone.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from International Phonetic Association: London via https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/Papers/ICPHS0939.pd

Crosslinguistic trends in tone change A review of tone change studies in East and Southeast Asia

Ground-breaking studies on how Bangkok Thai tones have changed over the past 100 years (Pittayaporn 2007, 2018; Zhu et al. 2015) reveal a pattern that Zhu 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

Language-specificity in auditory perception of Chinese tones

PL1213, LoC Subject Headings: Auditory perception, Chinese language--Tone, Chinese language--Phonolog

Songs By Hsiao Tyzen: The Interaction Between His Music And Taiwan

The purpose of this document is to understand Taiwanese composer Hsiao Tyzen\u27s artistic persona through analysis of the textual and musical characteristics of his songs. This document is comprised of: 1) an historical overview of Taiwan, 2) a history of Taiwanese vocal music, 3) a description of Hsiao Tyzen\u27s life and career, 4) an introduction to Taiwanese diction, 5) an examination and analysis of musical components (melody, rhythm, accompaniment and form) of four of Tyzen\u27s songs, and 6) a conclusion based upon sociological factors, historical influences and musical devices to define what constitutes the stylistic characteristics of the songs of Hsiao Tyzen. In 1949, the Chinese National Party lost the civil war to the Communist Party and subsequently retreated from China to Taiwan. Because of this mass exodus, Chinese culture was imposed onto the Taiwanese people. The government prevented composers from composing any songs in Taiwanese. However, Hsiao Tyzen resided in America and was able to continue to compose Taiwanese songs without restriction. His rich harmonic language reflects the influence of Western Neo-Romantic compositional style. His musical aesthetics are strongly associated with Taiwanese tradition. Therefore, many people have considered him a strong proponent of the Taiwanisation Movement. He has even been referred to as Taiwan\u27s Rachmaninoff. Hsiao Tyzen is an important figure in the history of the music of Taiwan. His songs present beauty through the elegance of the Taiwanese language. As a Taiwanese person, it is incumbent upon me to promote songs in our mother tongue and appreciate our distinguished native musician, Hsiao Tyzen

Tone sandhi, prosodic phrasing, and focus marking in Wenzhou Chinese

In most languages, focus (i.e. highlighting information) is marked by modifying the melody of the sentence. But how is focus marked in a Chinese dialect with eight different citation tones and a complex tonal phonology?This thesis investigates the connection between tonal realization and tone change (tone sandhi) in Wenzhou Chinese, and whether and how such a connection is conditioned by prosodic structure and focus marking. Experiments were conducted with young speakers of Wenzhou Chinese, whose speech was acoustically analyzed so as to investigate the application domain of tone sandhi and the influence of focus thereon, the tonal realization on the word and phrase level and its interaction with focus, the pre-planning of sentential pitch, as well as the realization of referents with different information statuses. The experimental findings suggest that the application, but not the implementation, of tone sandhi is independent of focus, and that focus and prosodic structure have similar but independent effects on the realization of lexical tones. It is also shown that pitch scaling is sensitive to syntactic structure and complexity, and that the marking of givenness, broad focus, and narrow focus leads to discrete levels along the same acoustic parameters. These findings are of interest to researchers working on lexical tone, prosodic structure, and how information structure categories such as focus affect tonal realization and prosodic phrasing.LEI Universiteit LeidenNWO VIDI grant 061084338 to dr. Y. ChenLanguage Use in Past and Presen