Intonation in Cantonese

The experiment in this paper explores the nature of intonation in a language which has lexical tone. In a pilot study it was found that a method of accounting for tone preservation (the identifiability of lexical tones in sentence contexts) which included a declining tone space was better suited to the task than one which assumed a level tone space. The main experiment attempted to separate and observe the contributions to this general downtrend made by boundary effects, tonal interaction and declination. There appears to be evidence for one type of boundary effect (initial raising) and declination. The data of this experiment were not consistent with the presence of the other type of boundary effect (final lowering) or tonal interaction factors. Two important variables were manipulated in this experiment. First, the length of a test sentence was manipulated on the assumption that longer sentences would show a greater decline of FO if there was a declination effect. Second, the discourse position of test sentences was varied (from discourse medial to discourse final) as a test for the effect of discourse final lowering

Prosodic focus in Vietnamese

This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis

Lexical and Prosodic Pitch Modifications in Cantonese Infant-directed Speech

Published online 03 February 2021The functions of acoustic-phonetic modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) remain a question: do they specifically serve to facilitate language learning via enhanced phonemic contrasts (the hyperarticulation hypothesis) or primarily to improve communication via prosodic exaggeration (the prosodic hypothesis)? The study of lexical tones provides a unique opportunity to shed light on this, as lexical tones are phonemically contrastive, yet their primary cue, pitch, is also a prosodic cue. This study investigated Cantonese IDS and found increased intra-talker variation of lexical tones, which more likely posed a challenge to rather than facilitated phonetic learning. Although tonal space was expanded which could facilitate phonetic learning, its expansion was a function of overall intonational modifications. Similar findings were observed in speech to pets who should not benefit from larger phonemic distinction. We conclude that lexicaltone adjustments in IDS mainly serve to broadly enhance communication rather than specifically increase phonemic contrast for learners.This work was supported by the University Grants Committee (HKSAR) (RGC34000118), the Innovation and Technology Fund (HKSAR) (ITS/067/18), Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation, and the Global Parent Child Resource Centre Limited. The second author’s work is supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Ramon y Cajal Research Fellowship, PID2019-105528GA-I00

The Prosodic System of Southern Bobo Madare

This dissertation describes the word-level and phrase-level prosodic system of Southern Bobo Madare (Bobo), a Mande language of Burkina Faso. I examine tonal aspects of Bobo’s prosodic system and provide an extensive phonetic description of the use of non-modal phonation and final lengthening to mark utterance type. The data examined include both elicitation tasks and spontaneous speech tasks. The work is conducted within the framework of autosegmental-metrical theory (Pierrehumbert 1980). Several aspects of the word-level prosodic system are discussed. Previous work on Bobo (Morse, 1976; Le Bris & Prost, 1981; Sanou, 1993) disagree on the inventory of contour tones and the existence of word stress. I present an analysis in support of three contour tones: High-Low, Low-High, and Low-Mid. I do not find clear phonetic evidence of word stress. Phonological analysis supports the existence of stress however: The distribution of reduced vowels supports the existence of iambic prosodic feet, which is common in Mande languages. Furthermore, the distribution of tone melodies is best explained by assuming that tone melodies are assigned to the foot rather than to the word or morpheme, similar to Leben’s (2001) proposal for tonal feet in Bamana. While both word-level and phrase-level prosody are discussed, most attention is given to phrase-level prosodic phenomena. In recent years, there has been increased interest in the phrase-level prosody of African tone languages (Downing & Rialland, 2016). However, detailed descriptions of the phrase-level prosody of Mande languages still remain extremely rare. This is the first such description of a Mande language with three tone levels. Bobo makes relatively little use of intonational tones. Declarative statements are marked only through final lengthening and in some cases non-modal vowel phonation. Polar questions show some characteristics of the areal “lax question prosody” described by Rialland (2009): L% boundary tone, which is concatenated onto the string of lexical tones, extreme lengthening of the phrase-final segment (always a vowel in Bobo), and breathy utterance termination. This L% boundary tone is the only clear case of an intonational tone in Bobo. Wh-questions can (but typically do not) have an L% boundary tone and have a lesser degree of phrase-final lengthening than polar questions. Negated statements do not have special prosodic characteristics. The phrase-level prosodic hierarchy of Bobo is relatively flat, consisting of only the intonational phrase. In addition to investigating the prosodic marking of utterance type, I present an investigation into focus marking in Bobo. I examine the responses to wh-questions and corrections, two contexts in which focus-marking is typically found cross-linguistically. I find no evidence of morphosyntactic or prosodic focus marking in these contexts. Bobo is therefore an additional example of an African tone language without obligatory focus marking in these contexts. The relevance of these results to our current understanding of prosodic typology is discussed throughout.PHDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163107/1/ksher_1.pd

Pre-low raising in Cantonese and Thai: Effects of speech rate and vowel quantity

Although pre-low raising (PLR) has been extensively studied as a type of contextual tonal variation, its underlying mechanism is barely understood. This paper explored the effects of phonetic vs phonological duration on PLR in Cantonese and Thai and examined how speech rate and vowel quantity interact with its realization in these languages, respectively. The results for Cantonese revealed that PLR always occurred before a large falling excursion (i.e., high-low); in other tonal contexts, it was observed more often in faster speech. In the Thai corpus, PLR also occurred before large falling excursions, and there was more PLR in short vowels. These results are discussed in terms of possible accounts of the underlying mechanism of PLR

Chapter 2: The Original ToBI System and the Evolution of the ToBI Framework

In this chapter, the authors will try to identify the essential properties of a ToBI framework annotation system by describing the development and design of the original ToBI conventions. In this description, the authors will overview the general phonological theory and the specific theory of Mainstream American English intonation and prosody that the authors decided to incorporate in the original ToBI tags. The authors will also state the practical principles that led us to make the decisions that the authors did. The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2.2 briefly chronicles how the MAE_ToBI system came into being. Section 2.3 briefly describes the consensus account of English intonation and prosody on which the MAE_ToBI system is based. Section 2.4 catalogues the different components of a MAE_ToBI transcription and lists the salient rules which constrain the relationships between different components. This section also expands upon the theoretical foundations and practical consequences of adopting the general structure of multiple labelling tiers, and particularly the separation of the labels for tones from the labels for indexing prosodic boundary strength. Section 2.5 then describes some of the extensions of the basic ToBI tiers that have been adopted by some sites. This section also compares our decisions about the number of tiers and about inter-tier constraints with the analogous decisions for some of the other ToBI systems described in this book. Section 2.6 discusses the status of the symbolic labels relative to the continuous phonetic records that are also an obligatory component of the MAE_ToBI transcription. Section 2.7 then closes by listing several open research questions that the authors would like to see addressed by MAE_ToBI users and the larger ToBI community

Intonation in Cantonese.

This thesis develops a system for describing intonation in Cantonese, a language having six phonological tones employing both pitch and slope. It analyses the utterance intonation contour into major intonation units, intonation units and feet. It defines what criteria those units meet and how they relate to each other. The intonation contours, constructed with a string of lexical tones, are described in terms of prosodic units which separate themselves in terms of pitch height and pitch span. The demarcation of the units is an innovation of the thesis. The different F0 values of identical phonological tones in an utterance are found to be in gradual descent if they are within an intonation group, and an intonation group is depicted more clearly when the two fitted lines which cover the top and the bottom are parallel and declined. A major intonation group is the largest prosodic unit in utterances. It is decided by a larger size of resetting of pitch span. An intonation group and a major intonation group each represent a unit of information which is semantically and syntactically coherent. The most prominent syllable in an intonation group is the tonic. An acoustic analysis of all possible combinations of the lexical tones of disyllabic and trisyllabic tonal sequences shows that tonal coarticulation is an important factor in modifying the F0 contours. The modification can affect both the pitch height and the slope of the F0 contours, and is also realised in both anticipatory and carryover effects. Prominence is examined, both at the level of words and of utterances, and a description of its prosodic parameters is developed with supporting evidence from the discussion of tonics

How tone, intonation and emotion shape the development of infants' fundamental frequency perception

Fundamental frequency (ƒ0), perceived as pitch, is the first and arguably most salient auditory component humans are exposed to since the beginning of life. It carries multiple linguistic (e.g., word meaning) and paralinguistic (e.g., speakers’ emotion) functions in speech and communication. The mappings between these functions and ƒ0 features vary within a language and differ cross-linguistically. For instance, a rising pitch can be perceived as a question in English but a lexical tone in Mandarin. Such variations mean that infants must learn the specific mappings based on their respective linguistic and social environments. To date, canonical theoretical frameworks and most empirical studies do not view or consider the multi-functionality of ƒ0, but typically focus on individual functions. More importantly, despite the eventual mastery of ƒ0 in communication, it is unclear how infants learn to decompose and recognize these overlapping functions carried by ƒ0. In this paper, we review the symbioses and synergies of the lexical, intonational, and emotional functions that can be carried by ƒ0 and are being acquired throughout infancy. On the basis of our review, we put forward the Learnability Hypothesis that infants decompose and acquire multiple ƒ0 functions through native/environmental experiences. Under this hypothesis, we propose representative cases such as the synergy scenario, where infants use visual cues to disambiguate and decompose the different ƒ0 functions. Further, viable ways to test the scenarios derived from this hypothesis are suggested across auditory and visual modalities. Discovering how infants learn to master the diverse functions carried by ƒ0 can increase our understanding of linguistic systems, auditory processing and communication functions