Relative importance of phonation cues in White Hmong tone perception

Garellek, Marc; Keating, Patricia; Esposito, Christina M.

doi:10.3765/bls.v38i0.3328

Cited by 2 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(16 reference statements)

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“…The primary goal of this study was to advance the quantitative description of the vocalic and suprasegmental features of White Hmong. Although tone and phonation in citation forms are well described for the language (Huffman 1987;Ratliff 1992;Esposito 2012;Garellek et al 2013Garellek et al , 2014, this is the first study to quantify and describe these features in a broader context. Our results reveal novel findings of descriptive and theoretical relevance for all features investigated.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Previous studies of White Hmong phonation associated with two tones have shown that the high-falling breathy -g tone is consistently breathier than the high-falling modal -j tone, and that the low-falling creaky -m tone is consistently creakier the low modal -s tone (Esposito 2012, Garellek 2012; see also Huffman 1987, who, as noted previously, found that the lowfalling tone was not consistently creaky). And in a series of perceptual studies, Garellek et al (2013Garellek et al ( , 2014 showed that listeners rely on the presence of breathiness to identify the high-falling breathy -g tone, but that they ignore the presence of creak when identifying the low-falling creaky -m tone. Instead, listeners rely on low f0 and short vowel duration to perceive the low-falling tone.…”

Section: Phonation Type Associated With the Breathy And Creaky Tonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The falling tones with non-modal phonation appear to be consistently breathy or creaky (Esposito 2012, Garellek et al 2013, Garellek, Keating & Esposito 2014). However, in earlier work (e.g.…”

Section: Tonal Inventory and Tone Sandhimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further support for this analysis may come from tone identification studies, which found that listeners do not rely on creaky voice to perceive the low-falling creaky -m (21) tone. Instead, listeners pay attention to f0 and duration (Garellek et al 2013(Garellek et al , 2014.…”

Section: Tonal Inventory and Tone Sandhimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Earlier work has shown for citations tones that the high-falling breathy -g tone is consistently breathy (relative to the high-falling modal -j tone), and that the low-falling creaky -m (21) tone is consistently creaky relative to the low modal -s (22) tone (Esposito 2012, Garellek 2012; see also Huffman (1987), who found that the low-falling tone was not consistently creaky, and Andruski (2006), who found that some speakers of Green Mong produce this tone with modal voice). Moreover, Garellek et al (2013Garellek et al ( , 2014 showed that listeners rely on the presence of breathiness to identify the high-falling breathy -g tone. However, they ignore the presence of creaky voice when identifying the low-falling creaky -m tone, relying instead on low f0 and short vowel duration.…”

Section: Phonationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

Garellek¹,

Esposito²

2021

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Phonation Type Associated With the Breathy And Creaky Tonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tonal Inventory and Tone Sandhimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tonal Inventory and Tone Sandhimentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Phonationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

Garellek¹,

Esposito²

2021

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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A sociotonetic study of Lalo tone split in progress

Yang

Stanford

Yang

2015

APLV

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Since Labov’s early work (e.g., 1963, 1966), sociolinguists have frequently examined change in progress on the segmental level, but much less is known about tone change in progress. The present study finds evidence of a tone split in progress in Lalo, a Tibeto-Burman language of China. While many of the world’s tone languages show historical evidence of tone splits, to our knowledge this is the first time that a tone split has been observed while it is occurring, making it possible to closely examine phonological, social, and perceptual factors. In this sociotonetic study of Lalo, 2,938 tone tokens were extracted from recordings of 38 speakers and analyzed in terms of age, sex, and educational level. Multifactorial analyses show that the temporal extent of voiced stops’ depression of Tone 1 F0 is increasing in apparent time, especially among women, while VOT of voiced stops is decreasing as educational levels improve, giving speakers more contact with Mandarin Chinese. The same 38 speakers were also given a perceptual identification task in which F0 was systematically adjusted. Mixed-effects modeling showed that listeners used multiple acoustic cues (consonant voicing, F0 onset, and F0 shape) to identify the voiced initial. These findings suggest that Lalo is undergoing a tone split that follows Beddor’s (2009) coarticulatory path to sound change.

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Relative importance of phonation cues in White Hmong tone perception

Abstract: <p>The study investigates the importance of phonation cues in White Hmong tone identification.</p>

Cited by 2 publications

References 14 publications

Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

Phonetics of White Hmong vowel and tonal contrasts

A sociotonetic study of Lalo tone split in progress

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