Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

Abstract

Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in their citation forms in carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both the vowel and tone systems of White Hmong from recordings of read speech. We confirm several features of the language, including the presence of nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized vowels through coarticulation with a coda [ŋ]), the description of certain tone contours, and the systematic presence of breathy and creaky voice on two of the tones. We also find little evidence of additional intonational f0 targets. However, we show that some tones vary greatly by their position in utterance, and propose novel descriptions for several of them. Finally, we show that $\textrm{H}1^{\!*}$ –H2*, a widely used measure of voice quality and phonation in Hmong and across languages, does not adequately distinguish modal from non-modal phonation in this data set, and argue that noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) are more robust to phonation differences in corpora with more variability.

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

“…For example, one Western Kammu variety has low tone (/pù:c/ 'rice wine') where another has breathiness (/pu: c/), and both stem from the voicing still seen in Eastern Kammu (/bu:c/) (Kingston 2011). This indicates that the development of tonal contrasts may occur together with the development of phonation contrasts (see discussion in Garellek and Esposito 2021;Gruber 2011;Ratliff 2015).…”

Phonation Variation as a Function of Checked Syllables and Prosodic Boundaries

“…For example, in Irish English, an accented syllable is consistently tenser than an unaccented syllable, regardless of the voice quality the speaker uses to pronounce the whole utterance (Yanushevskaya et al 2016); in American English, the phonetic performance of the pitch accent of words differs from that of prosodic boundaries, with the former accompanied by a higher CQ, while the latter is accompanied by a lower CQ (Bird and Garellek 2019). In White Hmong, a tonal language, the phonation differences of tones are not modulated by the prosodic position in the utterance (Garellek and Esposito 2021). Similarly, in Shaoxing Wu, a closely related language of Shanghainese, it is found that the syllables of the lower register always have breathier phonation than those of the upper register, regardless of the vocal effort (Kuang et al 2019).…”

“…However, cross-linguistically, it has been well documented that phonemic glottal stops are rarely realized as complete glottal closure, and their occurrence is conditioned by individual differences, contextual differences, and even other contingent factors (Borroff 2007;DiCanio 2012;Pan 2017;Ulrich 1993). More often, glottal stops are realized as incomplete glottal closure and can substantially influence the voice quality of the adjacent vowels and other vocalic segments (Esposito and Khan 2020;Garellek and Esposito 2021;Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996).…”

Voicing or register in Jarai dialects? Implications for the reconstruction of Proto-Chamic and for registrogenesis

“…Our last voice quality indicator, CPP, measures the noise component that is usually associated with non-modal phonation (Seyfarth & Garellek 2018;Garellek & Esposito 2021). A high CPP corresponds to a more modal voice.…”