Lesson 8 Phonetics: Tone

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Lesson 8 Phonetics Tone

• Yung-Chi Sung
• Department of Educational Psychology
• University of Minnesota
• Practicum for Future Faculty, Fall, 2003
• Mentor Dr. Andreas H. Schramm

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Main Goals

• (1) Have a understanding of tone.
• (2) Understand the difference between tone and
  non-tone languages-via the example of English and
  Chinese.

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Main Ideas

• (1) Tone
• (2) Phonological Principle

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Phonetics

• Articulatory Phonetics
• Acoustic Phonetics
• Perception Phonetics

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Phonetics

• Phonetics is the study of spoken
  languages-consonants, vowels, and the melodies
  and rhythms of speech.

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Vowels

• (1) Vowels are produced with a relatively open
  vocal tract.
• (2) Vowels can become the nucleus of a syllable
  by virtue of being able to carry stress.
• (3) Stress loudness, length, pitch.

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Tone

• (1) Fundamental frequency (F0) phonetic term
• (2) Pitch
• (3) Tone linguistic term

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Fundamental frequency (F0)

• (1) F0 is an acoustic term referring to the
  signal itself how many pulses per second does
  the signal contain.
• (2) In the case of speech signal, each pulse is
  produced by a signal vibration of the vocal
  folds.
• (3) The frequency of these pulses is measured in
  Hertz (Hz).
• (4) 1 Hz 1 cycle/per second

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Pitch

• (1) Pitch is a perceptual term.
• (2) What is the hearers perception of this
  signal is it heard as high in pitch or low in
  pitch, the same pitch as the previous portion of
  the signal, or different?
• (3) Pitch can be a property of speech or
  non-speech signals. I.e., music, high-pitched
  scream, bird-call.

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Tone

• (1) Tone is a linguistic term.
• (2) Tone refers to a phonological category that
  distinguishes two words or utterances.
• (3) Tone is a term relevant for language, and
  only for languages in which pitch plays a
  linguistic role (convey meaning).

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Is using Tones to convey word meanings a rare
case?
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Indo-European
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Non Indo-European
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Is using Tones to convey word meanings a rare
case?

• (1) How many languages are spoken in the world?
• 6533 (Crystal, 1998)
• (2) What is the percentage of tone languages
  spoken in the world?
• 60 to 70 (Yip, 2002)

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What is the most wildly spoken Tone language?

• (1) Among all tonal languages, Chinese is the
  most wildly spoken one
• (2) Major dialects of Chinese include Mandarin,
  Wu, Min, Yue (Cantonese), Hakka (Kejia), and
  Taiwanese.
• (3) Among all dialects, Mandarin is the most
  wildly spoken dialect.

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Mandarin Chinese

• (1) It belongs to an independent branch of the
  Sino-Tibetan language family.
• (2) There are about 867 millions first languages
  speakers of Mandarin Chinese and 1.052 billions
  speakers if we include second language speakers
  (1999, WA).
• (3) Only one other language has more population,
  what is it?

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Mandarin Chinese
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English

• (1) First languages speakers of English are about
  337 millions.
• (2) 2 billions if we count those countries where
  English has special status as a medium of
  communication (second language) (Crystal, 1998,
  pp. 361).

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English vs Chinese

• (1) One of those top two languages spoken in the
  world is tone language, the other is non tone
  language

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The differences between English Chinese

• (1) Written system
• (2) Tone

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Examples of Chinese written system

• (1) ? ?

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Examples of Chinese written system

• (1) ? ?

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Examples of Chinese written system-cont

• (1) ? ?

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Examples of Chinese written system-cont

• (1) ? ?

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Examples of Mandarin Chinese Tones

• Table 1 Tonal contrast in Mandarin Chinese
  (Ladefoged, 1993, pp.255)
• Tone number Description Pitch Example Gloss
  Chinese
• 1 high level 55 ma1 mother ?
• 2 high rising 35 ma2 hemp ?
• 3 low falling rising 214 ma3 horse ?
• 4 high falling 51 ma4 scold ?

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Examples of Mandarin Chinese Tone-conts

• ? ?
• yu2 yu4
• fish taro

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Examples of Mandarin Chinese Tone-conts

• ? ?
• ia1 ia2
• duck sprout/bud/shoot

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Examples of Mandarin Chinese Tone-conts

• ? ?
• jhu1/zhu1 jhu2/zhu2
• pork/pig bamboo

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Universal phonological principle

• English
• form phonology semantic meaning
• Chinese

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Universal phonological principle

• Perfetti and his colleagues claimed that reading
  for meaning in Chinese automatically involves the
  activation of phonology (Perfetti, 2003, pp 11).

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Universal phonological principleStroop
interference effect

• ? ?
• hong2 hong2
• red red

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Universal phonological principleStroop
interference effect

• Studies in English and Chinese have demonstrated
  that naming the ink color of incongruent color
  words (e.g., red or ? hong2 written in blue)
  took significant longer response time than naming
  the ink color of neutral word controls.
• The other is the Stroop facilitation effect.
  That is, naming the ink color of congruent color
  words (e.g., red or ? hong2 written in red)
  took significant shorter response time than
  naming the ink color of neutral word controls.

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Universal phonological principleStroop
interference effect

• ? ?
• hong2 hong2
• red broad
• broad ?, hong2, a homophone of the word red
  but does not share meaning or graphic elements.

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Universal phonological principleStroop
interference effect

• ? ?
• hong2 hong2
• red broad
• (1) Perfetti explains the finding as this effect
  is purely one of pronunciation.
• (2) Perfetti concludes that this interference
  clearly demonstrates that phonological access is
  automatic and difficult to ignore, just like
  meaning access for a word is difficult to ignore.

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Universal phonological principleThe end of the
story?

• Other factors to consider
• (1) Working memory
• (2) Words in a phrase, sentence or text.

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Why psychological research is important?

• (1) Learning disability Dyslexia
• (2) Deaf education