A Preliminary Study on Tonal Coarticulation in Continuous Speech

Abstract

Tonal variations in continuous speech are complicated in nature and it is a challenge to identify the effect of tonal coarticulation given several influencing factors. To address the issue, the present study proposes a scheme for labeling tonal coarticulation in Mandarin continuous speech by applying Hypo-and Hyper-articulation theory. We assume that the bidirectional tonal coarticulation (both carryover and anticipatory effects) as patterns of Hypo-articulation results from the economical articulatory rule. The effects may partially disappear under the influence of specific stress patterns and become unidirectional (carryover or anticipatory). At a prosodic boundary, the effects of tonal coarticulation may completely disappear and lead to the occurrence of patterns of Hyper-articulation. Based on the scheme, we have labeled the data in the Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse. It is shown that: three annotators are consistent at a fairly high level (86.2%) on average, and the acoustic parameters of four kinds of tonal coarticulation are significantly different. Therefore, we conclude that the proposal is feasible for investigating tonal coarticulation in Mandarin continuous speech. Though the labeling scheme is language dependent, it may well have cross-linguistic implications.

The use of tonal coarticulation in segmentation of artificial language speech: A study with Mandarin listeners

“…Recall that only 27% of the AL word tokens in the congruent-cues condition carried tonal carryover assimilation. This percentage was rather low considering the percentage of bitonal sequences that showed a tonal coarticulatory effect (i.e., about 51%) as reported by Hao et al (2018) for Mandarin corpus speech. Therefore, an alternative view was that our listeners were unable to benefit from tonal carryover assimilation under the congruent-cues condition simply because it was not reliably present, not because it was redundant with TP information.…”

“…Production experiments have revealed much evidence for tonal coarticulation in Mandarin and other lexical tone languages (see, e.g., Chen, 2012;Xu, 2001, for a review). Recently, Hao, Zhang, Xie, and Zhang (2018) proposed a scheme for annotating tonal coarticulation and applied it to speech samples from a Mandarin corpus. About 51% of bitonal syllable sequences in their data were labeled as being tonally coarticulated, suggesting that tonal coarticulation is prevalent in connected speech, at least in Mandarin.…”

F0 and voice quality of coarticulated Mandarin tones

“…However, Lin and Yan (1993) found that, in four-syllable words and phrases with typical stress pattern, tonal coarticulation was unidirectional: either carryover or anticipatory. Hao et al (2018) also showed that unidirectional and bidirectional effects coexist in continuous speech. Further, Lin and Yan (1993) found that the carryover/anticipatory coarticulation only affected the start/end points, without extending to the ends or starts of adjacent syllables.…”

“…In other words, there is both carryover and anticipatory coarticulation. Stronger carryover effects than anticipatory ones are found in the majority of the languages investigated; for example, Vietnamese (Han & Kim, 1974;Brunelle, 2003Brunelle, , 2009, Mandarin (Hao et al, 2018;Lin & Yan, 1993;Shen, 1990Shen, , 1992Xu, 1994Xu, , 1997, Taiwanese (Peng, 1997), Mizo (Dutta et al, 2017;Sarmah et al, 2015), Thai (Gandour et al, 1994;Potisuk et al, 1997), Tianjin Chinese (Li & Chen, 2016;Zhang & Liu, 2011), and Cantonese (Li et al, 2020). However, other languages show that the two effects are comparable, such that the carryover effects are no greater than the anticipatory ones; for example, Malaysian Hokkien (Chang & Hsieh, 2012), Nanjing Chinese (Chen et al, 2018), and Kinyarwanda (Flemming, 2011).…”

“…Tonal coarticulation in Mandarin has been studied extensively. The main findings include that Mandarin has bidirectional carryover and anticipatory effects, with the carryover ones being stronger, and that carryover effects are generally assimilatory while anticipatory effects are dissimilatory, though some tone-specific exceptions do exist (Hao et al, 2018;Shen, 1992;Xu, 1994Xu, , 1997. However, Lin and Yan (1993) found that, in four-syllable words and phrases with typical stress pattern, tonal coarticulation was unidirectional: either carryover or anticipatory.…”