Quality Tones (Vietnamese data)

2006

The tones of Tamang (Sino-Tibetan family) involve both F0 and voice quality characteristics: two of the four tones (tones 3 and 4) were reported to be breathy in studies from the 1970s. For the present research (thirty years later), audio and electroglottographic data were collected from 5 speakers of the Risiangku dialect in their 30s or 40s. Voice quality is estimated by computing the glottal open quotient. The present results bear on 788 syllables (from a corpus of 6,500). They show that in the speech of three speakers (M2, M3 ...

Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006, 2006

The tones of Tamang (Sino-Tibetan family) involve both F 0 and voice quality characteristics: two of the four tones (tones 3 and 4) were reported to be breathy in studies from the 1970s. For the present research (thirty years later), audio and electroglottographic data were collected from 5 speakers of the Risiangku dialect in their 30s or 40s. Voice quality is estimated by computing the glottal open quotient. The present results bear on 788 syllables (from a corpus of 6,500). They show that in the speech of three speakers (M2, M3, M5), tones 3 and 4 have a higher open quotient (which provides an indirect cue to the degree of breathiness) than tones 1 and 2, with tone 3 more clearly so than tone 4, especially for speaker M2. The difference in open quotient between the four tones for the other two speakers is negligible or inconsistent.

2019

Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, 2008

This study investigated native and non-native speaker tone production in Northern and Southern Vietnamese. Data analysis capitalized on normalization techniques for pitch and duration in order to allow direct comparison of individual speakers. The results revealed new insight into the relative starting positions of Northern Vietnamese tones. An analysis of non-native speaker tone errors indicated particular difficulty with low fallingrising tones, as well as difficulty with tone starting positions and changes in voice quality. We elicited all speech data using a dynamic carrier sentence task in which participants produced a series of three-word utterances in response to target words that appeared individually on a computer screen in one of four colors. In this way, participants actively described a changing event, while critical components of the utterance remained constant.

Language Documentation & Conservation, 2014

This paper focuses on the particular kinds of difficulties which arise in the study of an emergent tone-system, exemplified by Tamang in Nepal, where pitch, phonation and other laryngeal features combine in the definition of a tone. As a consequence, conducting a well-ordered analysis in stages first of phonetic transcription, then variation in context, then interpretation is not possible. Rather we have to discover the contrasting categories first, and study their phonetic realization next, or do both at the same time. This also leads to questioning the validity of the traditional distinction of features into “distinctive” and “redundant” and proposing instead an analysis of an abstract “tone” as a bundle of cues. We will only sketch the second characteristic of the Tamang tone system, the extension of tone over the phonological word. The contributions of instrumental studies and of a comparative-historical perspective are discussed.

Language and Linguistics Compass, 2016

2019

Tamang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal and India. We report findings from a newly recorded set of data that adopts words from Mazaudon (1973, 2004) as well as Hyonjan (1993, 1997). Various dialects of Tamang have been described as a language with a four-way tonal contrast (Hari 1970, Mazaudon 1973, 1978, Mazaudon and Michaud 2008, Owen-Smith 2014, Regmi and Regmi 2018). Our results, however, find that the Tamang variety we investigated is better described via voice onset time (VOT) with a three-way laryngeal contrast.