Abstract no. 4aSC3published_or_final_versio

Ciocca, V

Francis, AL

Ma, L

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Title Effects of native language experience on perceptual learning ofCantonese lexical tonesAuthor(s) Francis, AL; Ciocca, V; Ma, LCitation 147th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, New York,New York, USA, 24-28 May 2004, v. 115 n. 5 Pt 2, p. 2544Issued Date 2004URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/54215Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong Licensethe flows of the vocal tract. Acoustic information extracted from thespeech waveform is mapped into inputs for HLsyn. This analysis by syn-thesis approach is a method to develop a more precise picture of theplanning stage during speech production where the acoustic phoneticsmust be carefully planned and modified to acheive the correct targetsounds. Work funded by a grant provided by NIH.4aSC27. Text-to-phonemic transcription and parsing intomono-syllables of English text. Yugal Jusgir Mullick, S. S. Agrawal,Smita Tayal, and Manisha Goswami CSIO, CSIRComplex, 2nd Fl., PusaCampus, New Delhi, IndiaThe present paper describes a program that converts the English textentered through the normal computer keyboard into its phonemic repre-sentation and then parses it into mono-syllables. For every letter a set ofcontext based rules is defined in lexical order. A default rule is also definedseparately for each letter. Beginning from the first letter of the word therules are checked and the most appropriate rule is applied on the letter tofind its actual orthographic representation. If no matching rule is found,then the default rule is applied. Current rule sets the next position to beanalyzed. Proceeding in the same manner orthographic representation foreach word can be found. For example, ‘‘reading’’ is represented as‘‘rEdiNX’’ by applying the following rules:r→r move 1 position aheadead→Ed move 3 position aheadi→i move 1 position aheadng→NX move 2 position ahead, i.e., end of word.The phonemic representations obtained from the above procedure areparsed to get mono-syllabic representation for various combinations suchas CVC, CVCC, CV, CVCVC, etc. For example, the above phonemicrepresentation will be parsed as rEdiNX-→ /rE/ /diNX/. This study is apart of developing TTS for Indian English.4aSC28. Signature of prosody in tonal realization: Evidence fromStandard Chinese. Yiya Chen Theoretical and Appl. Linguist. Dept.,Edinburgh Univ., Adam Ferguson Bldg., EH8 9LL, UKIt is by now widely accepted that the articulation of speech is influ-enced by the prosodic structure into which the utterance is organized.Furthermore, the effect of prosody on F0 realization has been shown to bemainly phonological Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986; Selkirk andShen 1990. This paper presents data from the F0 realizations of lexicaltones in Standard Chinese and shows that prosodic factors may influencethe articulation of a lexical tone and induce phonetic variations in itssurface F0 contours, similar to the phonetic effect of prosody on segmentarticulation de Jong 1995; Keating and Foureron 1997. Data wereelicited from four native speakers of Standard Chinese producing all fourlexical tones in different tonal contexts and under various focus conditionsi.e., under focus, no focus, and post focus, with three renditions for eachcondition. The observed F0 variations are argued to be best analyzed asresulted from prosodically driven differences in the phonetic implementa-tion of the lexical tonal targets, which in turn is induced by pragmaticallydriven differences in how distinctive an underlying tonal target should berealized. Implications of this study on the phonetic implementation ofphonological tonal targets will also be discussed.4aSC29. Variation of Taiwanese tones in conversation. Pei-Yu Hsiehand Jane Tsay Inst. of Linguist., Chung Cheng Univ., 160 San-Xing,Min-Xiong, Chia-Yi 621, Taiwan, ROC, g9015001@ccu.edu.twIn laboratory research on tonal coarticulation in Taiwanese, one studyH.-B, Lin, Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Connecticut 1988 reported aperseveratory effect but no anticipatory effect, while another S.-H. Peng,J. Phonetics 25, 371–400 1997 found a significant anticipatory effect.Peng also found tonal variation due to prosodic positions. Unlike theseprevious laboratory studies, this study attempts to investigate tonal coar-ticulation and prosodic effects on Taiwanese tones using natural conver-sations from the Taiwanese Spoken Corpus Tsay and Myers, 2004, ofwhich 56 min of recorded conversations were analyzed. Consistent withLin, the results showed that tone is more affected by the preceding tonethan by the following tone. The slope is more influenced by the precedingtone as well. As for prosodic effects, the results confirmed Peng, showingthat F0 is the lowest in utterance-final position, while in other phrase-finalpositions it is slightly lower than in non-phrase-final position. This studythus demonstrates the results obtained in the laboratory do indeed carryover into actual conversation.4aSC30. Contrasting the effects of duration and number of syllableson the perceptual normalization of lexical tones. Valter Ciocca,Alexander L. Francis, and Teresa S.-K. Yau Div. of Speech & HearingSci., Univ. of Hong Kong, 5/F, 34 Hospital Rd., Hong Kong, HKSAR,China, vciocca@hkusua.hku.hkIn tonal languages, syllabic fundamental frequency (F0) patterns‘‘lexical tones’’ convey lexical meaning. Listeners need to relate suchpitch patterns to the pitch range of a speaker ‘‘tone normalization’’ toaccurately identify lexical tones. This study investigated the amount oftonal information required to perform tone normalization. A target CVsyllable, perceived as either a high level, a low level, or a mid levelCantonese tone, was preceded by a four-syllable carrier sentence whoseF0 was shifted 1 semitone, or not shifted. Four conditions were obtainedby gating one, two, three, or four syllables from the onset of the target.Presentation rate normal versus fast was set such that the duration of theone, two, and three syllable conditions normal carrier was equal to thatof the two, three, and four syllable conditions fast carrier. Results sug-gest that tone normalization is largely accomplished within 250 ms or soprior to target onset, independent of the number of syllables; additionaltonal information produces a relatively small increase in tone normaliza-tion. Implications for models of lexical tone normalization will be dis-cussed. Work supported by the RGC of the Hong Kong SAR, Project No.HKU 7193/00H.4aSC31. Effects of native language experience on perceptual learningof Cantonese lexical tones. Alexander L. Francis Dept. of Audiol. andSpeech Sci., Purdue Univ., Heavilon Hall, 500 Oval Dr., West Lafayette,IN 47907, francisa@purdue.edu, Valter Ciocca The Univ. of HongKong, Hong Kong, China, and Lian Ma Beijing Medical Univ., Beijing,ChinaIn a tonal language syllabic pitch patterns contribute to lexical mean-ing. Perceptual assimilation models of cross-language perception predictspeakers of another tonal language should assimilate Cantonese lexicaltones to native tonal categories, affecting identification, discrimination andacquisition. For nontonal language speakers, two possibilities exist. Ifpitch information is ignored, vowels with different tones should assimilateto the same native category, lowering performance. If tonal information isattended but unused in native categorization, Cantonese tones could benonassimilable and therefore easily discriminated, and possibly easilyidentified or learned. Here, native speakers of Mandarin Chinese andAmerican English were trained to identify Cantonese words differing inlexical tone. Discrimination and identification were tested before and aftertraining. Both groups initially performed well on upper register toneshigh level, high rising, mid level and poorly on lower low falling, lowlevel, low rising. Mandarin listeners improved most at identifying lowfalling tones; English listeners improved most on low level and low risingtones. Training primarily appeared to improve listeners’ ability to makecategorical decisions based on direction of pitch change, a feature report-edly under-attended by English speakers, but preferred by Mandarinspeakers. Work supported by research funding from The University ofHong Kong.2544 2544J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 115, No. 5, Pt. 2, May 2004 147th Meeting: Acoustical Soceity of America

Effects of native language experience on perceptual learning of Cantonese lexical tones

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Effects of native language experience on perceptual learning of Cantonese lexical tones

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