The articulatory tone-bearing unit: Gestural coordination of lexical tone in Thai

Karlin, Robin; Tilsen, Sam

doi:10.1121/2.0000089

Cited by 10 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…The distribution of lag values is centered on a positive lag for all three vowels, indicating that, on average, vowel movement follows consonant movement. Moreover, the size of the lag is comparable to what has been reported in past studies of CV lag in Mandarin (Gao, 2009; Zhang et al, 2019) and other lexical tone languages (Karlin and Tilsen, 2015; Hu, 2016; Karlin, 2018). There is also, however, substantial variation.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Consonant and vowel gestures in Mandarin were generally not synchronous in our data. The vowel movement typically began after the consonant, which is consistent with past work on Mandarin and other lexical tone languages (Gao, 2009; Hu, 2016; Karlin, 2018; Zhang et al, 2019). The spatial position of the tongue influenced when the vowel movement begins relative to the consonant.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 86%

“…The vowel typically starts well after the consonant. This pattern, positive C-V lag, has been reported for Mandarin before (Gao, 2008, 2009) and for other lexical tone languages (Karlin and Tilsen, 2015; Hu, 2016; Karlin, 2018). C-V lag tends to be longer for languages with lexical tone than for languages that have intonational tones or pitch accents (Mücke et al, 2009; Niemann et al, 2011; Hermes et al, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

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Spatially Conditioned Speech Timing: Evidence and Implications

Shaw

Chen

2019

Front. Psychol.

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Patterns of relative timing between consonants and vowels appear to be conditioned in part by phonological structure, such as syllables, a finding captured naturally by the two-level feedforward model of Articulatory Phonology (AP). In AP, phonological form – gestures and the coordination relations between them – receive an invariant description at the inter-gestural level. The inter-articulator level actuates gestures, receiving activation from the inter-gestural level and resolving competing demands on articulators. Within this architecture, the inter-gestural level is blind to the location of articulators in space. A key prediction is that intergestural timing is stable across variation in the spatial position of articulators. We tested this prediction by conducting an Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) study of Mandarin speakers producing CV monosyllables, consisting of labial consonants and back vowels in isolation. Across observed variation in the spatial position of the tongue body before each syllable, we investigated whether inter-gestural timing between the lips, for the consonant, and the tongue body, for the vowel, remained stable, as is predicted by feedforward control, or whether timing varied with the spatial position of the tongue at the onset of movement. Results indicated a correlation between the initial position of the tongue gesture for the vowel and C-V timing, indicating that inter-gestural timing is sensitive to the position of the articulators, possibly relying on somatosensory feedback. Implications of these results and possible accounts within the Articulatory Phonology framework are discussed.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Spatially Conditioned Speech Timing: Evidence and Implications

Shaw

Chen

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…To conclude, accumulating evidence shows that tones are not abstract autosegmentals, and gestural approaches have been revealing more details regarding tone production in particular and the production of syllable or other larger speech unit in general (c.f. [40]). It should be admitted, however, that more articulatory studies on different languages with diversities of tonal behaviors are required to further explore the nature of the production of tones.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tones are not abstract autosegmentals

Hu¹

2016

Speech Prosody 2016

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This paper renewed the representation problem of tone in phonology theory. Accumulating evidence from phonetic researches shows that tones are not abstract autosegmentals. In contrast, stable temporal structures are found regarding tonal alignments to segmental productions. That is, tone gesture is coupled with consonant and vowel gestures in syllable production. This paper described new evidence from Lhasa Tibetan, which is a well-known language of emergent tones or tonogenesis. Discussion covers such tonal languages as Wu Chinese dialects, known for its tonal spreading phenomenon that motivates the autosegmental nature of tones.

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“…Gestures are, importantly, specified in both space and time; gestures can contrast from each other in either dimension. Recently, tone has also fruitfully been treated as a gesture (Gao 2008;Karlin 2014;Mücke, Nam, Hermes, & Goldstein 2011;Prieto, Mücke, Becker, & Grice 2007;Yi 2014Yi , 2017. The space dimension is mapped in F0 space, as that is the linguistically relevant variable, rather than some laryngeal posture.…”

Section: Gestural Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expanding the gestural model of lexical tone: evidence from two dialects of Serbian

Karlin¹

2020

Preprint

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Featural and gestural models of tone differ on the degree to which they include timing information in the representation. However, both assume some kind of simultaneity between tones and their tone-bearing units, where featural models emphasize the role of acoustic relationships and gestural models instead emphasize articulatory coordination. We present the results of two acoustic production studies on two dialects of Serbian, a lexical pitch accent language. In the Belgrade dialect, pitch accents are aligned relatively late in the tone-bearing unit, while in the Valjevo dialect, pitch accents are phonetically retracted, sometimes into the preceding syllable. We varied the syllable onsets of tone-bearing units in falling (experiment 1) and rising (experiment 2) pitch accents, and measured the effects on F0 contours. Despite these differences in phonetic alignment, the phonological system is the same in both dialects. We argue that this apparent mismatch between the phonology and phonetics can be expressed straightforwardly in the Articulatory Phonology framework by allowing tone gestures to coordinate with other gestures in all the ways that segmental gestures can, rather than restricting tone to c-center coordination.

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The articulatory tone-bearing unit: Gestural coordination of lexical tone in Thai

Cited by 10 publications

References 3 publications

Spatially Conditioned Speech Timing: Evidence and Implications

Spatially Conditioned Speech Timing: Evidence and Implications

Tones are not abstract autosegmentals

Expanding the gestural model of lexical tone: evidence from two dialects of Serbian

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