Production and Perception of Rising Tone Sandhi in Mizo

Abstract

Mizo, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Kuki-Chin group is primarily spoken in the northeast Indian state of Mizoram in Northeast India. Mizo has four lexical tones, namely, high (H), rising (R) , falling (F) and low (L). Mizo tones are mostly dynamic, except the H tone which is a static tone. Previous researches have reported that the rising tone in Mizo changes into low tone when it is followed by either high tone or falling tone which is regarded as rising tone sandhi. The present study analyzes the production and perception of rising tone sandhi. The production data of rising tone sandhi is carried out by comparing the F0 contours of the derived low tone of rising tone sandhi in trisyllabic phrases with the citation form of low tone and low tone in phrases. Results have shown that the F0 contour of rising tone sandhi and the canonical low tone in Mizo are different in terms of F0 contour. The result of perception study in the form of identification test has shown that the speakers of Mizo could distinguish the low tone derived out of rising tone sandhi from the canonical low tone which indicates that tone sandhi in Mizo is perceptually categorical.

Vowel-Tone Interaction in Two Tibeto-Burman Languages

“…The salient characteristics of Mizo tones also aid automatic speech recognition in noisy conditions [20]. Apart from the four phonological tones, in a previous study, evidence of another salient Mizo tone resulting from tone sandhi is also mentioned [21].…”

Robust Mizo Continuous Speech Recognition

“…In case of noisy speech conditions, the vocal tract information gets severely affected, yet the fundamental frequency (F0) information is largely retained. Drugman et al [8] reported that The data involved in this tonal analysis is described in [10,11].…”

“…Accordingly, a method for automatic detection of tones was proposed, resulting in about 70% accuracy incorrect classification of the four tones in Mizo [17]. Apart from the four canonical tones, there is tone- sandhi in Mizo where the presence of high and falling tone after a rising tone lowers the F0 of the rising tone [11,12,15,18]. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.…”