Phonetics of Tongan stress

Garellek, Marc; White, James

doi:10.1017/s0025100314000206

Cited by 27 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Lowering of F1 for unstressed vowels in comparison to stressed vowels has also been observed in another 5-vowel stress language unrelated to Spanish: Tongan, a Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian language (Blust, 2009). Garellek and White (2015) reported that all 5 Tongan unstressed vowels were shifted upwards in the vowel space relative to vowels with stress. This pattern, present both in Tongan and in L1 and L2 Spanish, could be interpreted in reference to the sonority expansion hypothesis (Beckman et al, 1992), by which prominent (i.e., stressed/accented) vowels, irrespective of vowel height, show enhanced sonority.…”

Section: Vowel Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Stress-Induced Acoustic Variation in L2 and L1 Spanish Vowels

2018

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Aim: We assessed the effect of lexical stress on the duration and quality of Spanish word-final vowels /a, e, o/ produced by American English late intermediate learners of L2 Spanish, as compared to those of native L1 Argentine Spanish speakers. Methods: Participants read 54 real words ending in /a, e, o/, with either final or penultimate lexical stress, embedded in a text and a word list. We measured vowel duration and both F1 and F2 frequencies at 3 temporal points. Results: stressed vowels were longer than unstressed vowels, in Spanish L1 and L2. L1 and L2 Spanish stressed /a/ and /e/ had higher F1 values than their unstressed counterparts. Only the L2 speakers showed evidence of rising offglides for /e/ and /o/. The L2 and L1 Spanish vowel space was compressed in the absence of stress. Conclusion: Lexical stress affected the vowel quality of L1 and L2 Spanish vowels. We provide an up-to-date account of the formant trajectories of Argentine River Plate Spanish word-final /a, e, o/ and offer experimental support to the claim that stress affects the quality of Spanish vowels in word-final contexts.

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Section: Vowel Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Stress-Induced Acoustic Variation in L2 and L1 Spanish Vowels

2018

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“…The same setup was used for the Tongan speakers who read through a list of 1,154 real mono- and polysyllabic words to elicit all five vowels of Tongan, both as short and long vowels, and occurring in combination with the language’s coronal and velar consonants (see Table 1; see Heyne, 2016, p. 249–251 for the full word list); all Tongan participants read the list in the same order. In Tongan, ‘stress’ is commonly realized as a pitch accent on the penultimate mora of a word (Anderson and Otsuka, 2003, 2006; Garellek and White, 2015), although there are some intricate rules for ‘stress’ shift that do not apply when lexical items are elicited via a list. We only analyzed stressed vowels with stress assigned to the penultimate mora and Tongan words are often quite short, consisting minimally of a single vowel phoneme, so it did not take as long to elicit the Tongan wordlist as the numerically shorter NZE wordlist.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native Language Influence on Brass Instrument Performance: An Application of Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) to Midsagittal Ultrasound Images of the Tongue

2019

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This paper presents the findings of an ultrasound study of 10 New Zealand English and 10 Tongan-speaking trombone players, to determine whether there is an influence of native language speech production on trombone performance. Trombone players’ midsagittal tongue shapes were recorded while reading wordlists and during sustained note productions, and tongue surface contours traced. After normalizing to account for differences in vocal tract shape and ultrasound transducer orientation, we used generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) to estimate average tongue surface shapes used by the players from the two language groups when producing notes at different pitches and intensities, and during the production of the monophthongs in their native languages. The average midsagittal tongue contours predicted by our models show a statistically robust difference at the back of the tongue distinguishing the two groups, where the New Zealand English players display an overall more retracted tongue position; however, tongue shape during playing does not directly map onto vowel tongue shapes as prescribed by the pedagogical literature. While the New Zealand English-speaking participants employed a playing tongue shape approximating schwa and the vowel used in the word ‘lot,’ the Tongan participants used a tongue shape loosely patterning with the back vowels /o/ and /u/. We argue that these findings represent evidence for native language influence on brass instrument performance; however, this influence seems to be secondary to more basic constraints of brass playing related to airflow requirements and acoustical considerations, with the vocal tract configurations observed across both groups satisfying these conditions in different ways. Our findings furthermore provide evidence for the functional independence of various sections of the tongue and indicate that speech production, itself an acquired motor skill, can influence another skilled behavior via motor memory of vocal tract gestures forming the basis of local optimization processes to arrive at a suitable tongue shape for sustained note production.

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“…Tongan contrasts five vowels, /i e a o u/. Figure 3 shows the mean F1 and F2 values for vowels produced by our speaker (see also data for four female speakers in Garellek & White 2015). Word-final unstressed vowels, especially the high vowels /i u/, can undergo devoicing, especially when they occur phrase-finally (Morton 1962, Feldman 1978.…”

Section: Vowelsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…a breathy quality with more aspiration noise, or a creaky quality with less periodic voicing. Therefore, breathier vowels should have a higher H1*-H2* and lower CPP (relative to a more modal vowel), whereas creakier vowels should have both a lower H1*-H2* and CPP relative to a more modal vowel (Gordon & Ladefoged 2001, Garellek & White 2015.…”

Section: Three-way Laryngeal Contrasts Utterance-initiallymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tongan

Garellek¹,

Tabain²

2019

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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Tongan (lea fakatonga, ISO 639-3 code ton) is a Polynesian language spoken mainly in Tonga, where it is one of two official languages (with English). There are about 104,000 speakers of the language in Tonga, with nearly 80,000 additional speakers elsewhere (Simons & Fennig 2017). It is most closely related to Niuean, and more distantly related to West Polynesian languages (such as Tokelauan and Samoan) and East Polynesian languages (such as Hawaiian, Māori, and Tahitian). Previous work on the phonetics and phonology of Tongan includes a general grammar (Churchward 1953), a dissertation with a grammatical overview (Taumoefolau 1998), a phonological sketch of the language (Feldman 1978), two dictionaries (Churchward 1959, Tu‘inukuafe 1992), journal and working papers on stress (Taumoefolau 2002, Garellek & White 2015), intonation (Kuo & Vicenik 2012), as well as the ‘definitive accent’ (discussed below) and the phonological status of identical vowel sequences (Poser 1985; Condax 1989; Schütz 2001; Anderson & Otsuka 2003, 2006; Garellek & White 2010; Ahn 2016; Zuraw 2018). This illustration is meant to provide an overview of the phonetic structures of the language, and includes novel acoustic data on its three-way word-initial laryngeal contrasts, which are cross-linguistically rare. The recordings accompanying this illustration come from Veiongo Hehepoto, a native speaker of Tongan currently living in Melbourne, Australia. Ms. Veiongo was born in 1950 on the island of Vava‘u (northern Tonga), but grew up and was educated in the capital city Nuku‘alofa on Tongatapu (see Figure 1). She moved to Vanuatu when she was 16 years old, and when she was 21 moved to Australia where she trained as a nurse. She continues to speak Tongan every day with family members (including children, who were born in Australia) and friends.

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Phonetics of Tongan stress

Cited by 27 publications

References 41 publications

Stress-Induced Acoustic Variation in L2 and L1 Spanish Vowels

Stress-Induced Acoustic Variation in L2 and L1 Spanish Vowels

Native Language Influence on Brass Instrument Performance: An Application of Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) to Midsagittal Ultrasound Images of the Tongue

Tongan

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