An Experimental Investigation of Tone and Intonation in Cantonese

Abstract

It is generally believed that all languages, no matter how tonal, have grammatical intonation of some kind. A fall in pitch at the end of ordinary declarative sentences is thought to be universal. Hong Kong Cantonese has six contrastive tones, two rising and four level, according to the impressionistic account given here. The experimental results presented here indicate that sentence-final tone lowering does occur in Cantonese while contrastive stress apparently does not have a significant effect on pitch. In addition, it appears that although intelligibility is somewhat worse sentence-finally than sentence-medially, the tonal distinctions are not neutralized in final position.

On the (non)categorical perception of lexical tones

“…This contrast effect, or asymmetry, which may be related to the observation that Cantonese speakers show considerable declination in frequency over the course of an utterance (the so-called downstep; cf. Vance, 1976) is explored in greater detail in a related article (Francis & Ciocca, 2003).…”

“…One possible cause of the observed decrease in sensitivity at higher frequencies following the sentence context is that Cantonese listeners typically expect pitch to drop over the course of an utterance, a phenomenon called tone declination or downdrift (Vance, 1976;Wong, 1999). Because the frequency specifications of the stimuli used in this experiment were based on recordings of syllables produced in the middle of a sentence, not at the end, tokens toward the lower frequency end of the continuum probably lie closer to where the center of the talker's pitch range would be at the end of a sentence.…”

“…For the identification task, the sentence /ÎO25 wui25 t h Ok22 ji pEi25 lEi24 t h EÎ55/ (I will read ----for you to hear) was used. A sentence with the target syllable located in the middle was used to mitigate the influence of sentential intonation that might affect the fundamental frequency of the target syllable in final position (Vance, 1976;Zee, 1998). The identification sentence was recorded with a /ji/ syllable with a mid-level tone in the target position to ensure that appropriate coarticulatory cues were included in the pre-and posttarget syllables.…”

Effect of intonation on Cantonese lexical tones

“…The effect of intonation on the acoustic properties of tone has been a subject of research in various Chinese tone languages such as Chengtu ͑Chang, 1958͒, Cantonese ͑Fok-Chan, 1974Lee, 2004;Vance, 1976͒, andMandarin ͑Ho, 1977;Rumjancev, cited in Lyovin, 1978;Shen, 1989;Lin, 2004͒. It is generally agreed that intonation is likely to modify the F0 patterns of tones, but the specific F0 patterns vary across tone languages.…”

A Study of the Cantonese Hearsay Particle wo from a Tonal Perspective

“…(p. 29) In her description of Malaysian Cantonese, there are only five tones with no tone 5 (p. 24). Vance (1976) took one more step and observed that it was difficult to auditorily differentiate tone 3 from tone 5:…”