Breathy voice and low-register: A case of trading relation in Shanghai Chinese tone perception?

Abstract

In Shanghai Chinese as well as many other Wu dialects, breathy voice is a well-documented accompaniment of the low-register tone syllables with obstruent as well as sonorant onsets. But Shanghai Chinese is rapidly changing and the breathy voice associated with low-register tones tends to disappear in young speakers’ productions. In this study, we asked whether breathy voice is nevertheless still perceived and whether it pushes tone identification toward low-register tones. We conducted forced-choice tone identification tests on young native listeners of Shanghai Chinese, using low–high register tone continua—from tone T3 (23) to tone T2 (34)—imposed on base syllables with either modal or breathy voice quality, and beginning with various onset consonants. We used continua constructed from either naturally produced or synthesized syllables. Our results show that breathy voice does bias tone identification responses toward the low-register tone T3. This result held for both synthesized and natural stimuli, except for the /m/-onset stimuli derived from naturally produced syllables. We propose that the phonetic change at issue—loss of breathiness in production—is not due to misperception but reflects the ever-stronger influence of Standard Mandarin Chinese. In other words, this particular case of sound change seems to be led by production rather than perception. It remains an open question whether this kind of sound change is only determined by sociolinguistic factors (here, the dominance of Mandarin Chinese) or is independently motivated by phonetic and/or phonological factors.

Fundamental Frequency and Phonation Differences in the Production of Stop Laryngeal Contrasts of Endangered Shina

“…Voiceless aspirated stops were characterized by the highest H1*-H2*, H1*-A1*, H1*-A2*, and H1*-A3* onsets compared to other two laryngeal categories. These results are in line with other languages of the world where aspirated stops have been shown as having a higher spectral tilt at the onset of the following vowels than unaspirated stops (Shanghai Chinese: Gao et al 2020;Yerevan Armenian: Seyfarth and Garellek 2018;Dzongkha: Kirby and Hyslop 2019;Hindi/Urdu: Schertz and Khan 2020;Gujarati: Esposito et al 2020;Marathi: Berkson 2019;Dmitrieva and Dutta 2020). Raising of the spectral tilt due to aspiration appears to be a universal correlate.…”

“…There are four spectral tilt measures: (a) H1*-H2* (the amplitude difference between the first [H1] and second [H2] harmonic); (b) H1*-A1* (the amplitude difference between the first harmonic [H1] to the amplitude of F1); (c) H1*-A2* (the amplitude difference between the first harmonic [H1] to the amplitude of F2); and (d) H1*-A3* (the amplitude difference between the first harmonic [H1] to the amplitude of F3) (Garellek 2019). Aspirated stops have higher spectral tilt at the onset of following vowels than non-aspirated stops (Brunelle et al 2019;Esposito and Khan 2012;Gao et al 2020;Seyfarth and Garellek 2018). For example, in Dzongkha (Kirby and Hyslop 2019), Hindi/Urdu (Schertz and Khan 2020), Gujarati , and Marathi (Berkson 2019;Dmitrieva and Dutta 2020), aspirated stops have been reported to show higher H1*-H2* and H1*-A1* at the onset of following vowels than voiceless unaspirated stops.…”

Individual and dialect differences in perceiving multiple cues: A tonal register contrast in two Chinese Wu dialects

“…An early study by Ren (1992) found that breathy voice was a perceptual cue for the lower register. A later perception study by Gao, Hallé, and Draxler (2019) found that voice quality did influence perception for both natural (produced by a trained phonetician) and synthesized stimuli. While Zhang and Yan (2015) found that Shanghai listeners heavily relied on F0 information for the register distinction, they also used breathiness as one of the non-primary cues.…”

“…Unlike previous work on perception of voice quality, we explore breathiness as a perceptual cue in fine detail by creating a continuum from natural endpoints that changes in all aspects of the acoustic space for breathiness. Previous studies either only have two levels (breathy versus modal, e.g., Gao et al, 2019;Zhang & Yan, 2015), or manually modified only certain parameters (e.g., Garellek et al, 2013, who modulated H1-H2, H2-H4, H4-2 kHz, and 2 kHz-5 kHz). We also investigate how different dialectal experience caused by sound change is manifested in the perception of multiple cues at both the group level and the individual level by comparing Shanghai and Jiashan Wu listeners on stimuli from both dialects.…”

Dialect proficiency and Mandarin rating in dialect identification: The case of Jiangsu province

“…When Chinese dialects were investigated, most studies focused on the description of dialects, that is, their region and population distribution, phonetic and lexical characteristics, and attitudes toward the dialect. Experimental study of Chinese dialects is gradually increasing with a strong emphasis on the perception of tones (see Gao, Hallé, & Draxler, 2019 Wang & Chen, 2016 for Shanghai dialect), or mutual intelligibility across or within dialects (see Tang, 2009 for fifteen Chinese dialects; see Inoue, 2018 for dialect varieties in Fujian province). Very few studies have directly addressed identification of Chinese dialects.…”