Levenshtein distance, also known as string edit distance, has been shown to correlate strongly with both perceived distance and intelligibility in various Indo-European languages (Gooskens and Heeringa, 2004;Gooskens, 2006). We apply Levenshtein distance to dialect data from Bai (Allen, 2004), a Sino-Tibetan language, and Hongshuihe (HSH) Zhuang (Castro and Hansen, accepted), a Tai language. In applying Levenshtein distance to languages with contour tone systems, we ask the following questions: 1) How much variation in intelligibility can tone alone explain? and 2) Which representation of tone results in the Levenshtein distance that shows the strongest correlation with intelligibility test results? This research evaluates six representations of tone: onset, contour and offset; onset and contour only; contour and offset only; target approximation Wang, 2001), autosegments of H andChao's (1930) pitch numbers. For both languages, the more fully explicit onset-contouroffset and onset-contour representations showed significantly stronger inverse correlations with intelligibility. This suggests that, for cross-dialectal listeners, the optimal representation of tone in Levenshtein distance should be at a phonetically explicit level and include information on both onset and contour.
Since Labov’s early work (e.g., 1963, 1966), sociolinguists have frequently examined change in progress on the segmental level, but much less is known about tone change in progress. The present study finds evidence of a tone split in progress in Lalo, a Tibeto-Burman language of China. While many of the world’s tone languages show historical evidence of tone splits, to our knowledge this is the first time that a tone split has been observed while it is occurring, making it possible to closely examine phonological, social, and perceptual factors. In this sociotonetic study of Lalo, 2,938 tone tokens were extracted from recordings of 38 speakers and analyzed in terms of age, sex, and educational level. Multifactorial analyses show that the temporal extent of voiced stops’ depression of Tone 1 F0 is increasing in apparent time, especially among women, while VOT of voiced stops is decreasing as educational levels improve, giving speakers more contact with Mandarin Chinese. The same 38 speakers were also given a perceptual identification task in which F0 was systematically adjusted. Mixed-effects modeling showed that listeners used multiple acoustic cues (consonant voicing, F0 onset, and F0 shape) to identify the voiced initial. These findings suggest that Lalo is undergoing a tone split that follows Beddor’s (2009) coarticulatory path to sound change.
Ground-breaking studies on how Bangkok Thai tones have changed over the past 100 years (Pittayaporn 2007,2018;Zhu et al. 2015) reveal a pattern thatZhu et al. (2015)term the “clockwise tone shift cycle:” low > falling > high level or rising-falling > rising > falling-rising or low. The present study addresses three follow-up questions: (1) Are tone changes like those seen in Bangkok Thai also attested in other languages? (2) What other tone changes are repeated across multiple languages? (3) What phonetic biases are most likely to be the origins of the reported changes? A typological review of 52 tone change studies across 45 Sinitic, Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Tibeto-Burman languages reveals that clockwise changes are by far the most common. The paper concludes by exploring how tonal truncation (Xu 2017) generates synchronic variation that matches the diachronic patterns; this suggests that truncation is a key mechanism in tone change.
Lawu is a severely endangered, undocumented Ngwi (Loloish) language spoken in Yunnan, China. This paper presents a preliminary sketch of Lawu phonology based on lexico-phonetic data recorded from two speakers in 2008, with special attention to the tone splits and mergers that distinguish Lawu from other Ngwi languages. All tone categories except Proto-Ngwi Tone *3, a mid level pitch, have split, conditioned by the voicing of the initial segment. In the conditioning and effect of these tone splits, Lawu shows affinity with other Central Ngwi languages such as Lisu and Lahu and is provisionally classified as a Central Ngwi language.
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