Consonants, vowels and tones across Vietnamese dialects

Abstract

Understanding differences between Vietnamese dialects is important so that speech-language pathologists and educators provide appropriate services to people who speak Vietnamese.

Nonword repetition stimuli for Vietnamese-speaking children

“…The Vietnamese syllable consists of three main components, the onset, rime, and tone; and closed and open syllables (e.g., CVC and CV) are permitted (Tang, 2007). Phonemes in Vietnamese consist of consonants in syllable-initial position, consonants and semivowels in syllable-final position, vowel singletons and diphthongs, and tones (Tang, 2007; Pham & McLeod, 2016). The number of initial consonants (21–24), final consonants (6), and tones (4–6) vary across regional dialects (Pham & McLeod, 2016).…”

“…In order to create the nonword stimuli, we first selected syllable-initial consonants, syllable-final consonants, vowels, and tones that are shared across dialects to make the task accessible to Vietnamese-speaking children across Vietnam and the Diaspora. Of the 16 syllable-initial consonants shared across dialects (Pham & McLeod, 2016), we selected six phonemes that were consistently found in the phonetic inventories of young Vietnamese-speaking children (Tang & Barlow, 2006): /b, d, t, s, k, ɣ/. Vietnamese syllable-final consonants are restricted to six nasals and unreleased stops (/m, n, ŋ, p˺, t˺, k˺/), of which two phonemes are produced differently across dialects when preceded by certain vowels: /n, t˺/ (Pham & McLeod, 2016).…”

“…Of the 16 syllable-initial consonants shared across dialects (Pham & McLeod, 2016), we selected six phonemes that were consistently found in the phonetic inventories of young Vietnamese-speaking children (Tang & Barlow, 2006): /b, d, t, s, k, ɣ/. Vietnamese syllable-final consonants are restricted to six nasals and unreleased stops (/m, n, ŋ, p˺, t˺, k˺/), of which two phonemes are produced differently across dialects when preceded by certain vowels: /n, t˺/ (Pham & McLeod, 2016). Therefore, we selected the four consonants that would not be influenced by vowel contexts: /p˺, k˺, m, ŋ/.…”

“…Vietnamese uses a Romanized orthography in which each syllable is separated by a space. The orthography is highly transparent, with a near one-to-one sound-letter correspondence (Pham & McLeod, 2016). Consistent with Vitevitch and Luce (2004), frequency counts were converted to log (base 10) values.…”

Development of Vietnamese Speech Synthesis System using Deep Neural Networks

“…While Englishs phonological system is commonly 5 known as the composition of 44 phonemes [28]. According to Ben Pham & Sharynne McLeod [29], Vietnamese north dialect contains a total of 50 phonemes, in which there are 20 initial consonants, 2 initial semi-vowels, 10 final consonants, 2 final semi-vowels, 9 long singleton vowels, 4 short singleton vowels, and 3 dipthongs. In addition to that, Vietnamese has a total of 6 tones [30,31,32].…”