A comparison of native speaker and American adult learner Vietnamese lexical tones (original) (raw)
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2007 FACTORS AFFECTING THE PRODUCTION OF VIETNAMESE TONES A Study of American Learners
This study investigates factors that affect the accuracy of tone production by American students of Vietnamese as a second language (L2). Nine hypotheses are examined, each of which isolates a factor expected to affect production accuracy: (a) task type, (b) the position of a tone in a clause, (c) discourse distance between a model provided by a native speaker and the learner's utterance, (d) markedness relationships of the tones, (e) emphasis, (f) the preceding and following tones in the string, (g) voicing of the initial consonant, (h) postvocalic elements in the syllable, and (i) vowel height. The findings show that the patterns of tone production by the American learners of Vietnamese are influenced by universal mechanisms of phonetics and phonology, first language structures, and L2-specific rules. The results also provide a framework for determining the difficulty of tones in different environments.
Speaker Variability in the Realization of Lexical Tones
While previous studies on the speaker-discriminatory power of static f0 parameters abound, few have focused on the dynamic and linguistically-structured aspects of f0. Lexical tone offers a case in point for this endeavour. This paper reports an exploratory study on the speaker-discriminatory power of individual lexical tones and of the height relationship of level tone pairs in Cantonese, and the effects of voice level and linguistic condition on their realization. Twenty native Cantonese speakers produced systematically controlled words either in isolation or in a carrier sentence under two voice levels (normal and loud). Results show that f0 height and f0 dynamics are separate dimensions of a tone and are affected voice level and linguistic condition in different ways. Moreover, discriminant analyses reveal that the contours of individual tones and the height differences of level tone pairs are useful parameters for characterizing speakers.
This study tested how linguistic experience and psychoacoustic factors affect tonal perception of Mandarin, English and French speakers. AX discrimination tasks of speech and non-speech tones were conducted. Results showed that the subjects performed differently in the speech and non-speech tasks. In the speech task, while the three L1 groups shared some confusable tone pairs due to their acoustical similarity, they differed in specific pairs under the influence of L1 linguistic experience. In the non-speech task, however, the three L1 groups did not have different error patterns of individual pairs. In short, both L1 experience and psychoacoustic similarity of stimuli were found to have an impact on the perception of non-native tones.
Dialect experience in Vietnamese tone perception
This study investigated the perceptual dimensions of tone in Vietnamese and the effect of dialect experience on listener’s prelinguistic perception of tone. While Northern Vietnamese tones are cued by a combination of pitch and voice quality, Southern Vietnamese tones are purely pitch based. 30 listeners from two Vietnamese dialects (10 Northern, 20 Southern) participated in a speeded AX discrimination task using northern stimuli. The resulting reaction times were used to compute an INDSCAL multidimensional scaling solution and were submitted to hierarchical clustering analysis. While the analysis revealed a similar three-dimensional perceptual space structure for both listener groups, corresponding roughly to f0 offset, voice quality, and contour type, the relative salience of these dimensions varied by dialect: Southern listeners were more likely to confuse tones produced with nonmodal voice quality, whereas Northern listeners found tones with similar pitch excursions to be more confusable. The results of hierarchical clustering of the stimuli further support an analysis where low-level perceptual similarity is influenced by primary dialect experience.
Quantitative analysis and synthesis of syllabic tones in vietnamese
2003
The current paper presents a preliminary study on the production and perception of syllabic tones of Vietnamese. A speech corpus consisting of fifty-two six-syllable sequences with various combinations of tones was uttered by two speakers of Standard Vietnamese, one male and one female. The corpus was labeled on the syllabic level and analyzed using the Fujisaki model. Results show that the six tone types basically fall into two categories: Level, rising, curve and falling tone can be accurately modeled by using tone commands of positive or negative polarity. The so-called drop and broken tones, however, obviously require a special control causing creaky voice and in cases a very fast drop in F0 leading to temporary F0 halving or even quartering. In contrast to the drop tone, the broken tone exhibits an F0 rise and hence a positive tone command right after the creak occurs. Further observations suggest that drop and broken tone do not only differ from the other four tones with respect to their F0 characteristics, but also as to their much tenser articulation. A perception experiment performed with natural and resynthesized stimuli shows, inter alia, that tone 4 is most prone to confusion and that tone 6 obviously requires tense articulation as well as vocal fry to be identified reliably.
Investigating the variation of intonation contours in Northern Vietnamese tones
Frontiers in Education, 2024
Intonation is an instrument for structuring discourse and emphasizing different types of information. In German, for example, pitch is used to highlight focus, while in Vietnamese, different pitch contours distinguish lexical tones. As of yet, the interplay between intonation and lexical tone in relation to information structure has not been sufficiently investigated across languages. Vietnamese has six lexical tones and is particularly interesting for investigating the influence of different intonation strategies on the realization of tones. Here, we present a production study with 70 Northern Vietnamese speakers. The participants read six sentences under two conditions. In each sentence, a word occurring in the final position of the sentence and carrying one of the six tones was pronounced in two different discourse contexts. Acoustic analyses of the intonation contours showed that Vietnamese speakers realized the words with significant differences in pitch at the onset. Yet, the strategies for raising or lowering the pitch varied depending on the tone. Our results show the use of prosodic cues in a complex tone system across a large number of speakers. In addition, the study can serve as a starting point for educational programs that include training on intonation patterns in specific contexts.
Syllabic tone perception in Vietnamese
2006
This paper discusses tone perception in Vietnamese under audio only and audio plus video conditions. The lower part of a male speaker's face was recorded on digital video as he uttered 22 sets of syllabic tokens covering the six different tones of Vietnamese. In a perception study the audio signal alone, as well as audio plus video conditions were presented to native Vietnamese speakers who were required to decide which tone they perceived. Audio was presented in various conditions: clear and babble-noise masked at different SNR levels, as well as a devoiced noise condition using LPC resynthesis. In the devoiced and the clear audio conditions, there is little augmentation of audio alone due to the addition of video. However, the addition of visual information did significantly improve perception in the babble-noise masked condition at an SNR of -9 dB. This outcome suggests that the improvement in noise-masked conditions is not due to additional information in the video per se, but rather to an effect of early integration of acoustic and visual cues facilitating auditory-visual speech perception.
How Pitch Moves: Production of Cantonese Tones by Speakers with Different Tonal Experiences
Tonal Aspects of Languages 2016, 2016
This study investigates how native prosodic systems as well as L2 learning experience shape non-native tone production in terms of tone movement, a primary cue to tone identity. In an imitation task, the six Cantonese tones were produced by four speaker groups: native Mandarin speakers (tonal), native English speakers (non-tonal), native English speakers with Mandarin learning experience (L2 tonal) and native Cantonese speakers (control group). The results indicate that native prosodic systems influence non-native tone production: Mandarin speakers are more accurate on pitch contour than pitch height while English speakers perform better on level tones than contour ones. Furthermore, L2 tonal experience assists L3 tone production, as English-speaking Mandarin learners produce Cantonese tones in the most native-like shape, outperforming both Mandarin and English speakers.
Effects of speaking rate and context on the production of Mandarin tone
2015
Acoustic variability is ubiquitous in speech. To understand how listeners cope with this variability, the present study focuses on Mandarin tones. Since the major cues to tone are both spectral (F0 height and direction) and temporal (turning point, TP), tones provide a good test case to evaluate effects of context. The present study examined production variation due to changes in speaking rate and tonal context. Twelve speakers (6M, 6F) produced target syllables with the four different Mandarin tones at fast, normal and slow speaking rates. These syllables appeared at the end of a carrier sentence, following either a high-level tone (Tone 1) or a high-falling tone (Tone 4). Speaking rate had a similar effect across all tones and consonants while preceding context resulted in changes to temporal parameters such as turning point.