Effects of talker-to-listener distance on tone

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis paper explores the effects of talker-to-listener distance (TLD) on tone and examines its impact on tone perception by both native listeners and second language learners.Speakers naturally adjust vocal effort to talk to people at different distances, which leads to changes not only in intensity, duration and formant frequencies, but also in fundamental frequency (f0). Fundamental frequency is the primary acoustic cue that differentiates Mandarin lexical tones from one another. This study aims to answer the question of whether changes in f0 as a function of TLD affect tone perception by native (L1) and second language (L2) listeners. If so, what are the specific changes that have an impact on tone perception?The production study investigates the acoustic correlates of the effects of TLD on tone, using 7959 monosyllabic Mandarin speech files recorded by three speakers under 11 levels of TLD. The perception study explores the effects of TLD on L1 and L2 tone perception by 2 native listeners and 52 L2 listeners.The effects of TLD on speech production are systematic, and we present models and analyses with sufficient detail to simulate these effects. Intensity, duration, and initial and maximum f0 increase along with TLD, while time-normalized toneshapes remain invariant. The results of the perception study show that native listeners' performance is robust under changes in TLD, while L2 listeners' perception of tone interacts with TLD. One significant finding is that tone 3 recognition improves with TLD.This work investigates the relationship between speech production and perception when acoustic attributes change naturally in response to the demands of speech communication. The results have potential applications in speech synthesis, pronunciation training and second language testing.Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Do Explicit Instruction and High Variability Phonetic Training Improve Nonnative Speakers’ Mandarin Tone Productions?

“…Rather, it was the interaction of the two variables: Becoming explicitly aware of F0 height cues and being exposed to varied, multi-speaker exemplars resulted in more accurate Tone 1 productions. This finding is in line with Shih and Lu's (2015) claim that learners can sometimes struggle to recognize Tone 1 when the utterance is not entirely level. One interpretation of these results is that the term level may be misleading as many Tone 1 productions contain a slight F0 rise or fall (Ho, 1976;Howie, 1976;Tseng, 1981).…”

“…For the monolingual L1 English group, however, this was an unexpected result given the robust improvement observed in Wang et al. (), and the similar facilitatory effects reported in the lexical tone perceptual learning literature (e.g., Barcroft & Sommers, , ; Sadakata & McQueen, ; Shih & Lu, ). The difference between the present study and Wang et al.…”

“…For the L1 Mandarin and L2 Mandarin groups, this finding was expected given their prior experience with the four tones. For the monolingual L1 English group, however, this was an unexpected result given the robust improvement observed in Wang et al (2003), and the similar facilitatory effects reported in the lexical tone perceptual learning literature (e.g., Barcroft & Sommers, 2005, 2014Sadakata & McQueen, 2014;Shih & Lu, 2015). The difference between the present study and Wang et al may reflect the more complicated 4-day training paradigm involving nonce symbols paired with sounds, which presumably added a cognitive load that was absent in Wang et al's study.…”

Acoustic properties of vowels in Upper Necaxa Totonac

“…The Nearey extrinsic method was selected because there were unequal numbers of each vowel in a category and because it is vowel-extrinsic and formant-intrinsic, which reduces the physiological variation while maintaining sociological and dialectal variation. All f0 values were converted into semitones (Nolan 2003, Shih & Lu 2015. The semitone conversion has been used to normalize f0 values across speakers of different sizes and genders.…”

Interactional and pragmatics-related prosodic patterns in Mandarin dialog

“…This assumption-free strategy can be contrasted with that of [22] who started with a model of the "lower-level effects" of tone and then examined the residue when these were eliminated. We choose an assumption-free strategy because, despite many advances in the modeling of tone [31,32], we are working with noisy and complex dialog data, where building a reasonable baseline model of the "lower-level effects" of tone would be an extreme challenge.…”