Reduction in Dali Nisu tone change-in-progress

Proceedings of the 10th Speech Prosody , 2020

Wu Chinese, spoken in Southeast China, developed high and low tonal register contrast from onset voicing contrast in history. A new sound change observed in production is that the phonation type contrast of the vowel has emerged and meanwhile the pitch difference across tonal registers arising from tonogenesis is narrowing in young speakers' speech. The current study aims to investigate the perceptual cue(s) that distinguishes the tonal register contrast for speakers of different age groups in Wenzhou dialect of Wu. A generational change is found on the perceptual cues in perceiving the tonal contrast. Old speakers use both low pitch and vowel breathiness to perceive the low register tones, and any type of cue conflict may lead to a bias to the high register tones. The pitch still has an effect for young speakers but the cue weighting has been decreased. The vowel phonation type difference has become the primary perceptual cue of tonal register contrast for young speakers. A potential new sound change after tonogenesis could be observed, that the phonetic realisation of the contrast has changed from a segmental feature (consonantal voicing) to a suprasegmental feature (tone), and now is further changing to another segmental feature (vowel phonation).

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report, 2009

Interspeech 2019, 2019

Intrinsic F0 (IF0) has been considered a phonetic phenomenon that has a physiological basis. However, considering cross linguistic variation in IF0, it is also assumed that there is an amount of speaker intended control on IF0. This work looks into the two tone languages spoken in North East India and confirms the evidence of IF0 in the languages. However, it also shows that as soon as speakers exert control over F0 for tone production, IF0 differences diminish. As previously reported, in this study too, IF0 differences were noticed to be more pronounced in the higher F0 regions.

95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, 2021

Video poster presentation with narration available here: https://youtu.be/_Ma7PfrSSn4 We present here a new unified model to explain the origins and evolution of tone and register in East and Southeast Asia, topics which have generally been investigate separately in different academic circles. After briefly introducing this new Desegmental Model, we focus in on one of its principle component sound change mechanisms which we call the East Asian Voicing Shift (EAVS). Through EAVS, onset voicing contrasts transphonologize into a register contrast upheld by a bundle of co-varying phonetic cues including pitch, voice quality and vowel quality. With few exceptions, this register contrast then either conditions a doubling of the lexical tone inventory in languages which already employ lexically contrastive pitch or it conditions a doubling of the vowel inventory in languages which do not. EAVS is massive in scope, having affected the vast majority of langauges in the region across five separate langauge families. It is perhaps the most sweeping sound change event yet described in linguistics.

Phonetica, 2008

Tamang (Bodic division of Tibeto-Burman) is spoken at the edge of the East Asian "tone-prone" zone, next to the almost tone-free Indian linguistic area, and is, chronologically, at the late end of the tone multiplication wave which has swept through East Asia in the course of the last two millenia. It can be regarded as a 'missing link' in tonogenesis: following the loss of voicing contrasts on syllable-initial consonants, Tamang has four tonal categories instead of its earlier two-tone system; the present state of the prosodic system is typologically transitional, in that these four tonal categories are realised by several cues which include fundamental frequency (F0), phonation type, and allophonic variation in the realisation of consonants. Acoustic and electroglottographic recordings of 131 words in two carrier sentences by five speakers were conducted (total number of target syllables analysed: 1651). They allow for a description in terms of F0, glottal open quotient, duration, and realisation of consonants. The results confirm the diversity of cues to the four tonal categories, and show evidence of laxness on tones 3 and 4, i.e. on the two tones which originate diachronically in voiced initials. The discussion hinges on the phonological definition of tone.

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2007

The Western dialect of Naxi has four lexical tones: High, Mid, Low and Rising; the latter is rare in the lexicon. Rising contours on monosyllables are frequent in connected speech, however, as a result of a process of syllable reduction: reduction of a morpheme carrying the High tone results in re-association of its tone to the syllable that precedes it in the sentence, creating a rising contour. An experiment (with one speaker and five listeners) establishes that there is not only one rising contour that originates in tonal reassociation, as reported in earlier descriptions, but two: Low-to-High and Mid-to-High—as could be expected by analogy with phenomena observed in Niger-Congo languages and elsewhere. A second set of experiments (same speaker; six listeners) investigates the reduction of Mid- and Low-tone syllables: they reduce to [ə̄] and [ə̀], respectively, and coalesce with the preceding syllable (in Naxi, syllabic structure is simply consonant+glide+vowel). Unlike High-tone syllable reduction, this process stops short of complete tonal de-linking. These experiments aim to provide a complete picture of syllable reduction patterns in Naxi. It is argued that the notions of floating tones and tonal reassociation can be usefully applied to the Naxi data.

2018

Deori, a Tibeto-Burman language (henceforth TB) belonging to the Bodo- Koch language group [10] can be unambiguously called an endangered language [2]. This paper analyzes the production and perception of lexical tones in Deori. Most recently, some remnant lexical tonal contrast has been shown in Deori with acoustic evidence [11]. Following the minimal tonal contrast prevalent among the older generation [11] a production experiment was conducted to determine the tonal distinction in the speech of the younger generation. The production experiment was followed by a perception test to investigate the impact of language experience on the perception of lexical tones in Deori. The result of production test shows a trend of underlying tone reversal H>L; L>H in monosyllables and a considerable F0 variation in the disyllabic stems. The tone reversal can be described as tone swap where a high tone has a low fundamental frequency and vice-versa. The perception test result too shows a sim...

Linguistics Vanguard

We conducted a perception experiment in the field to examine the synchronic consequences of a tonal split in Risiangku Tamang (Tibeto-Burman). Proto-Tamang was a two-tone language with three series of plosives and two series of continuants. The merger of its continuants provoked a split of the original two tones into four, two high and two low, which combine pitch and phonation features. The quasi-merger of the voiced and voiceless plosives left sporadic remnants of initial plosive voicing in low tone syllables. A previous production study has shown that speakers use pitch and phonation features concomitantly to distinguish high from low tones, while producing initial plosive voicing only marginally with low tones. The present perception study establishes the preeminence of the pitch cue, but also confirms the effective use of the two older cues in tone identification. An apparent-time analysis shows the phonation cue to be less used by younger speakers, in keeping with the historic...

Proceedings of the symposium Cross- …, 2005

Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019, 2019

Qu, Zhousuo 瞿周梭 & Cathryn Yang. 2019. Acoustic analysis of tone in Benna Hani: Tone sandhi and neutralization in an atypical Tibeto-Burman language. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 1967-1971). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc. We present the first acoustic analysis of the tone system of Benna Hani, a poorly documented and potentially endangered non-standard variety of Hani (China: Southeastern Tibeto-Burman, Ngwi). Benna Hani is unusual for a Ngwi language in that it shows complex tone sandhi and tone neutralization. Benna Hani has only three contrastive tone categories (T1, T2, and T3), but sandhi patterns show a profusion of phonetically arbitrary variants for each category. 33 Benna Hani speakers (17 female) recorded 47 monosyllables and 36 disyllables in isolation and embedded in a carrier phrase. 10,118 tokens were extracted and normalized in semitones relative to mid level pitch. We plot mean F0 trajectories with 95% confidence intervals for monosyllables and disyllables. Acoustic analysis results cohere with native speaker intuition, namely that T1 and T3 neutralize in monosyllables and in the first syllable in a disyllabic compound, but are distinguished in the second syllable of disyllables.