Tonal Distinctions in Cantonese

Abstract

The experiment reported here is a perceptual study of the six contrastive tones of Cantonese. The monosyllable [jλu] was synthesized, and a large number of closely spaced Fo contours were applied to it. Listeners were asked to identify each synthetic stimulus as one of six Cantonese words which all have the segmental shape [jλu] and differ only in tone. The response data were used to compare two impressionistic accounts of the tonal distinctions and determine which reflects actual Fo more accurately. In general, the results accord fairly well with straightforward predictions made from the impressionistic accounts, but there is one major exception. It appears that something in addition to differences in Fo is involved in distinguishing the low-low tone from the other tones.

Tone perception in Cantonese and Mandarin: A cross-linguistic comparison

“…Moreover, listeners from a nontone language attached more importance to the dimension of level than did listeners from three of the four tone languages, and Chinese listeners placed more emphasis on this dimension than did Thai listeners. Other studies have found that tone levels are more important than contours for Cantonese tones (Tse, 1973(Tse, , 1978Vance, 1976Vance, , 1977. All of these studies suggest a significant role of language background in listeners' tone perceptions.…”

Effect of tonal native language on voice fundamental frequency responses to pitch feedback perturbations during sustained vocalizations

“…Tonal language listeners such as Mandarin and Cantonese are better at discriminating the direction of movement of F 0 (e.g., rising or falling) than English listeners (Gandour and Harshman, 1978;Gandour, 1983). However, when compared to Mandarin listeners, Cantonese listeners placed more emphasis on the average F 0 level (i.e., whether the height of F 0 is high or low) (Vance, 1976(Vance, , 1977Tse, 1978). In addition, Cantonese listeners have been found to be better at discriminating Mandarin tones than Mandarin listeners are at discriminating Cantonese tones (Lee et al, 1996).…”

“…Thus, there seems to be a differential effect of the pattern of tonal modulations in Mandarin on the modulation of vocal responses to pitch feedback perturbations. It is noted that Mandarin and Cantonese differ not only in the number of tones (six vs four) but also that Cantonese speakers place more emphasis on the perception of the height of level tones than do Mandarin speakers (Vance, 1976(Vance, , 1977Tse, 1978), suggesting that Cantonese speakers may monitor their voice F 0 more tightly to produce correct tonal patterns during sustained vocalization than Mandarin speakers. In this case, Cantonese speakers may attenuate their vocal responses to the perturbations in the auditory feedback during the production of sustained vowels, which is analogous to the observation that musicians produced small or no compensatory responses to pitch feedback perturbations when they were asked to hit a specific note (Zarate and Zatorre, 2008).…”

Talkers account for listener and channel characteristics to communicate efficiently

“…For example, Zhao and Jurafsky (2009) found that speakers of Cantonese, a language with six lexical tones, produced elevated f0 for all tones in the presence of noise (in an expected Lombard effect), but found an effect of word frequency on f0 only for mid-level tones. Zhao and Jurafsky pointed out that these are the tones that are most perceptually confusable (Khouw & Ciocca, 2007;Vance, 1977;Whitehill, Ciocca, & Chow, 2000), and so benefit the most from additional redundancy. Additionally, as mentioned in the introduction, Buz et al (2014) found that talkers produce stronger VOT contrasts when there is a plausible VOT-minimal-pair referent in the discourse context, a result which Kirov and Wilson (2012) also found with a different experimental methodology.…”