The Prosody of Harar Oromo Nouns

This paper examines the tone in Harar Oromo, a language widely spoken in Ethiopia. The focus is on tone in nouns. The examination implements acoustic analysis of tone using pitch contours, which helps in determining the type and position of tone in roots and in nominative and accusative case. The results show that roots can have either L or H tone, while case suffixes always have H tone. This suggests that tone is predictable in suffixes, but not in roots. The analysis suggests that Harar Oromo has a restricted tone system that is similar to stress-like languages.

Categorical Perception of Mandarin Pitch Directions by Cantonese-Speaking Musicians and Non-musicians

Purpose: This study is to investigate whether Cantonese-speaking musicians may show stronger CP than Cantonese-speaking non-musicians in perceiving pitch directions generated based on Mandarin tones. It also aims to examine whether musicians may be more effective in processing stimuli and more sensitive to subtle differences caused by vowel quality.Methods: Cantonese-speaking musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency generated based on Mandarin level, rising and falling tones on two vowels with nine duration values.Results: Cantonese-speaking musicians exhibited a stronger categorical perception (CP) of pitch contours than non-musicians based on the identification and discrimination tasks. Compared to non-musicians, musicians were also more sensitive to the change of stimulus duration and to the intrinsic F0 in pitch perception in pitch processing.Conclusion: The CP was strengthened due to musical experience and musicians benefited more from increased stimulus duration and were more efficient in pitch processing. Musicians might be able to better use the extra time to form an auditory representation with more acoustic details. Even with more efficiency in pitch processing, musicians' ability to detect subtle pitch changes caused by intrinsic F0 was not undermined, which is likely due to their superior ability to process temporal information. These results thus suggest musicians may have a great advantage in learning tones of a second language.

An Iterated Two-Step Sinusoidal Pitch Contour Formulation for Expressive Speech Synthesis

Intonation generation in expressive speech such as storytelling is essential to produce high quality Malay language expressive speech synthesizer. Intonation generation, for instance explicit control, has shown good performance in terms of intelligibility with reasonably natural speech; thus, it was selected in this research. This approach modifies the prosodic features, such as pitch contour, intensity, and duration, to generate the intonation. However, modification of pitch contour remains a problem because the desired pitch contour is not achieved. This paper formulated an improved pitch contour algorithm to develop a modified pitch contour resembling the natural pitch contour. In this work, the syllable pitch contours of nine storytellers were extracted from their storytelling speeches to create an expressive speech syllable dataset called STORY_DATA. All the shapes of pitch contours from STORY_DATA were analyzed and clustered into the standard six main pitch contour clusters for storytelling. The clustering was performed using one minus the Pearson product moment correlation. Then, an improved iterative two-step sinusoidal pitch contour formulation was introduced to modify the pitch contours of a neutral speech into an expressive pitch contour of natural speeches. Overall, the improved pitch contour formulation was able to achieve 93 percent high correlated matches, indicating the high resemblance as compared to the previous pitch contour formulation at 15 percent. Therefore, the improved formula can be used in a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer to produce a more natural expressive speech. The paper also discovered unique expressive pitch contours in the Malay language that need further investigations in the future.

Phonetic and lexical encoding of tone in Cantonese heritage speakers

Heritage speakers contend with at least two languages: the less dominant L1 (heritage language), and the more dominant L2. Maintaining the heritage language allows heritage speakers to communicate with members of their community. In some cases, their L1 and L2 bear striking phonological differences. In the current study, we investigate this in the context of Toronto-born Cantonese heritage speakers and their maintenance of Cantonese lexical tone, a linguistic feature that is absent from English, the more dominant L2. Across two experiments, Cantonese heritage speakers were tested on their phonetic/phonological and lexical encoding of tone in Cantonese. Experiment 1 was an AX discrimination task with varying inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs), which revealed that heritage speakers discriminated tone pairs with distinct pitch contours better than those with shared contours. Experiment 2 was a medium-term repetition priming experiment, designed to extend the findings of Experiment 1 by examining tone representations at the lexical level. We observed a positive correlation between tone minimal pair priming and English dominance. Thus, while increased English dominance does not affect heritage speakers' phonological-level representations, tasks that require lexical access suggest that heritage Cantonese speakers may not robustly and fully distinctively encode Cantonese tone in lexical memory.

When Music Speaks: An Acoustic Study of the Speech Surrogacy of the Nigerian Dùndún Talking Drum

Yorùbá dùndún drumming is an oral tradition which allows for manipulation of gliding pitch contours in ways that correspond to the differentiation of the Yorùbá linguistic tone levels. This feature enables the drum to be employed as both a musical instrument and a speech surrogate. In this study, we examined four modes of the dùndún talking drum, compared them to vocal singing and talking in the Yorùbá language, and analyzed the extent of microstructural overlap between these categories, making this study one of the first to examine the vocal surrogacy of the drum in song. We compared the fundamental frequency, timing pattern, and intensity contour of syllables from the same sample phrase recorded in the various communicative forms and we correlated each vocalization style with each of the corresponding drumming modes. We analyzed 30 spoken and sung verbal utterances and their corresponding drum and song excerpts collected from three native Yorùbá speakers and three professional dùndún drummers in Nigeria. The findings confirm that the dùndún can very accurately mimic microstructural acoustic temporal, fundamental frequency, and intensity characteristics of Yorùbá vocalization when doing so directly, and that this acoustic match systematically decreases for the drumming modes in which more musical context is specified. Our findings acoustically verify the distinction between four drumming mode categories and confirm their acoustical match to corresponding verbal modes. Understanding how musical and speech aspects interconnect in the dùndún talking drum clarifies acoustical properties that overlap between vocal utterances (speech and song) and corresponding imitations on the drum and verifies the potential functionality of speech surrogacy communications systems.

Beyond segments

This review attempts to chart a research program that focuses on tonal bilingualism. More than 70% of the world languages use pitch contours to disambiguate word meanings, however, limited empirical and theoretical effort was made to understand the processing mechanisms of lexical tones in the bilingual context. This article will start with the main characteristics of tonal languages, with a focus on Mandarin Chinese, followed by empirical findings on lexical tones in both monolingual and bilingual populations. Finally, this article will propose a few important theoretical issues relevant to tonal bilingualism and implications of learning a tonal language as a second/foreign language.

Native language, L2 experience, and pitch processing in music

The current study investigated how the role of pitch in one’s native language and L2 experience influenced musical melodic processing by testing Turkish and Mandarin Chinese advanced and beginning learners of English as an L2. Pitch has a lower functional load and shows a simpler pattern in Turkish than in Chinese as the former only contrasts between presence and the absence of pitch elevation, while the latter makes use of four different pitch contours lexically. Using the Musical Ear Test as the tool, we found that the Chinese listeners outperformed the Turkish listeners, and the advanced L2 learners outperformed the beginning learners. The Turkish listeners were further tested on their discrimination of bisyllabic Chinese lexical tones, and again an L2 advantage was observed. No significant difference was found for working memory between the beginning and advanced L2 learners. These results suggest that richness of tonal inventory of the native language is essential for triggering a music processing advantage, and on top of the tone language advantage, the L2 experience yields a further enhancement. Yet, unlike the tone language advantage that seems to relate to pitch expertise, learning an L2 seems to improve sound discrimination in general, and such improvement exhibits in non-native lexical tone discrimination.

The phonological determinants of tone in English loanwords in Mandarin

This paper presents the results of a corpus study and an online loanword adaptation experiment examining the tonal adaptation of English loanwords in Mandarin. Using maximum entropy models, I control for the substantial influences of lexical tone distributions and standardisation, and uncover phonological determinants of tone beyond these lexical and conventional factors. The most important phonological determinant of tone in the corpus was English voicing, while in the experiment it was English stress-aligned pitch contours. I argue that these distinct tonal adaptation patterns constitute two different perceptual mappings, one from F0 perturbations to tone and the other from English intonation to tone, both arising due to particular borrowing contexts. I suggest that increasingly close contact between English and Mandarin may lead to more intonation-driven tonal adaptation in the latest wave of borrowing. The maximum entropy approach holds promise for the analysis of complex cases of tonal adaptation in other languages.

Phrase-final intonation adjustment in Lebanese Arabic

Intonation languages such as English and German have been described as having, among others, ‘realizational’ differences with regard to their intonation (Ladd 1996). One such difference is whether phrase-final pitch contours that lack sufficient segmental material to be realized naturally are subjected to truncation or compression. The current investigation examines this question in Lebanese Arabic. Stimuli were created with decreasing segmental material (disyllabic phrase-final, monosyllabic phrase-final) for both statements and questions. The contours produced by 16 speakers consisted of rises (questions) and rise-falls (statements). Results indicate that reducing the segmental material induces compression in rises and truncation in rise-falls, supporting the claim that languages cannot simply be divided into compressing versus truncating languages, and that the shape of the intonational contour plays a role in accommodation strategies. Speaker variation is also discussed.