When marking tone reduces fluency: an orthography experiment in Cameroon

Should an alphabetic orthography for a tone language include tone marks? Opinion and practice are divided along three lines: zero marking, phonemic marking and various reduced marking schemes. This paper examines the success of phonemic tone marking for Dschang, a Grassfields Bantu language which uses tone to distinguish lexical items and some grammatical constructions. Participants with a variety of ages and educational backgrounds, and having different levels of exposure to the orthography were tested on location in the Western Province of Cameroon. All but one had attended classes on tone marking. Participants read texts which were marked and unmarked for tone, then added tone marks to the unmarked texts. Analysis shows that tone marking degrades reading fluency and does not help to resolve tonally ambiguous words. Experienced writers attain an accuracy score of 83.5% in adding tone marks to a text, while inexperienced writers score a mere 53%, which is not much better than chance. The experiment raises serious doubts about the suitability of the phonemic method of marking tone for languages having widespread tone sandhi effects, and lends support to the notion that a writing system should have `fixed word images'. A critical review of other experimental work on African tone orthography lays the groundwork for the experiment, and contributes to the establishment of a uniform experimental paradigm

Influences of Implementing the Learning Organisation on Companies’ Financial and Non-Financial Performances

The learning organisation (LO) concept as one of the numerous management tools available has been significantly gaining in popularity around the globe. Yet few models have been implemented to assess the lo’s influences on companies’ non-financial and financial performances. Therefore, at the usp Institute a Learning Organisation Assessing Model (LOAM) was developed and implemented over a period of five years. The empirical research presented in this article reveals positive non-financial and financial effects on the performances of companies with a more developed LO concept according to the LOAM. Research findings reveal the critical success factors in the implementation of the LO and provide tangible advice to management in helping them to achieve the best results possible when applying the LO concept.management tools and techniques, learning organisation, financial and non-financial performances

A Plea for Randomness

This is a paper in the philosophy of education. We discuss the current international educational trend of eradicating randomness from education processes, thereby truing to maximize the probability of attaining predetermined goals. We argues against this that minimizing the space for randomness is neither possible nor desirable, since randomness is a precondition of the new

Enhancement of optical response in nanowires by negative-tone PMMA lithography

The method of negative-tone-PMMA electron-beam lithography is investigated to improve the performance of nanowire-based superconducting detectors. Using this approach, the superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have been fabricated from thick 5-nm NbN film sputtered at the room temperature. To investigate the impact of this process, SNSPDs were prepared by positive-tone and negative-tone-PMMA lithography, and their electrical and photodetection characteristics at 4.2 K were compared. The SNSPDs made by negative-tone-PMMA lithography show higher critical-current density and higher photon count rate at various wavelengths. Our results suggest a higher negative-tone-PMMA technology may be preferable to the standard positive-tone-PMMA lithography for this application

What tone teaches us about language

In ‘Tone: Is it different?’ (Hyman 2011a), I suggested that ‘tone is like segmental phonology in every way—only more so’, emphasizing that there are some things that only tone can do. In this presidential address my focus extends beyond phonology, specifically addressing what tone tells us about the integration (vs. compartmentalization) of grammar. I discuss some rather striking examples that demonstrate problems for the strict separation of phonology, morphology, and syntax, each time posing the question, ‘What else is like this outside of tone?’. A particularly interesting property that is strictly limited to tone is what I term syntagmatic relativity. I suggest that the uniqueness of tonal phenomena is due to the versatility of pitch, which can be manipulated with a wide range of linguistic functions. Given this versatility, I end by considering the question, ‘Why isn’t tone universal?’.*

Implications of Autosegmental Analysis in the Exploration of Prosodic Phonology in Mandarin Chinese

Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith, 1979) is a theoretical framework for understanding the phonological effects of suprasegmentals such as tone, stress, etc. Using data taken from an experiment in which Mandarin Chinese tone sandhi (the acknowledged rules governing specific tone shifts across segments) is explored, a number of phonologists, specifically Kenstowicz (2003), have shown that the relationship between the segment and the tone is autonomous. In the experiment, non-sense words with a potential tone sandhi rule are presented to the Mandarin speakers. The speakers automatically apply the tone sandhi rule which is then analyzed using an autosegmental framework. The speakers consciously separate the tones from the non-sense words and apply tone sandhi rules; the application of the tone sandhi rule is independent of semantic meaning. This research is expanded to include the exploration of loanword phonology (the phonological changes that occur when a tonal language borrows non-tonal language words) to further understand the autonomous relationship between tones and segments. As can be seen in the following example, the English word Disney: di2-si1-ni2 (numbers account for the differing tones), certain tones are distributed to loanwords

Tone in Fwe

This paper describes the use of tone in Fwe, a little-studied Bantu language (K.402) spoken in Zambia and Namibia. Fwe has two underlying tones, and their surface realization is determined by a number of tone rules, such as Meeussen’s Rule, high tone shift and the realization of high tones as falling. Tone also interacts with prosodic lengthening, which affects the penultimate syllable of a phrase-final word, and phonological lengthening, which affects syllables with a glide or followed by a prenasalized consonant

Automated tone transcription

In this paper I report on an investigation into the problem of assigning tones to pitch contours. The proposed model is intended to serve as a tool for phonologists working on instrumentally obtained pitch data from tone languages. Motivation and exemplification for the model is provided by data taken from my fieldwork on Bamileke Dschang (Cameroon). Following recent work by Liberman and others, I provide a parametrised F_0 prediction function P which generates F_0 values from a tone sequence, and I explore the asymptotic behaviour of downstep. Next, I observe that transcribing a sequence X of pitch (i.e. F_0) values amounts to finding a tone sequence T such that P(T) {}~= X. This is a combinatorial optimisation problem, for which two non-deterministic search techniques are provided: a genetic algorithm and a simulated annealing algorithm. Finally, two implementations---one for each technique---are described and then compared using both artificial and real data for sequences of up to 20 tones. These programs can be adapted to other tone languages by adjusting the F_0 prediction function.Comment: 12 pages, 4 postscript figures, uses examples.sty, newapa.sty, latex-acl.sty, ipamacs.st