Jianjing Kuang

The Tonal Space of Contrastive Five Level Tones

Multiple-level tone contrasts are typologically disfavoured because they violate the dispersion principles of maximizing perceptual distance and minimizing articulatory effort. This study investigates the tonal dispersion of a multiple-level tone system by exploring the cues used in producing and perceiving the five level tones of Black Miao. Both production and perception experiments show that non-modal phonations are very important cues for these tonal contrasts. Non-modal phonations significantly contribute to the dispersion of the five level tones in two ways: either by enhancing pitch contrasts or by providing an additional contrastive cue. Benefiting from more than one cue, the level tones T11, T33 and T55 are well distinguished in the tonal space; by contrast, the level tones T22 and T44, only contrasting in pitch, are the most confusable tones. The tonal registers model proposed in this article sheds light on the different uses of non-modal phonations across languages.

Glottal articulations in tense vs lax phonation contrasts

This study explores the glottal articulations of one type of phonation contrast—the tense vs lax phonation contrasts of three Yi (Loloish) languages—which is interesting because neither phonation type is very different from modal voice, and both are independent of the languages’ tonal contrasts. Electroglottographic (EGG) recordings were made in the field, and traditional EGG measures showed many small but significant differences between the phonations. Tense phonation involves more overall contact and briefer but slower changes in contact. Functional Data Analysis was then applied to entire EGG pulse shapes, and the resulting first principal component was found to be mostly strongly related to the phonation contrasts, and correlated with almost all the traditional EGG measures. Unlike the traditional measures, however, this component also captures differences in abruptness of contact. Furthermore, previously-collected perceptual responses from native speakers of one of the languages correlated better with this component than with any other EGG measure or any acoustic measure. The articulatory differences between these tense and lax phonations, involving glottal aperture and how glottal closure is made, are not extreme, but apparently they are consistent enough, and perceptually robust enough, to support this linguistic contrast. [Work supported by NSF.]

Breathy voice during nasality: A cross-linguistic study

Abstract In some languages, there is a diachronic correspondence between nasal and breathy sounds, whose origin is often attributed to the acoustic similarities between nasal and breathy vowels. In this study, we test whether nasal consonants and vowels are also produced with breathier voice quality than their oral counterparts in three Yi (Loloish) languages: Bo, Luchun Hani, and Southern Yi. We analyzed oral vs. nasal vowels and consonants using electroglottographic and acoustic measures of phonation. Results indicate that nasal consonants are often breathier than laterals, as are vowels following nasals when compared to vowels following oral consonants. These findings support the assumption that at least some of these nasal-breathy sound changes involve a stage in which the two articulations co-occur. We claim that the production of breathy voice quality during nasals can arise through listener misperception or phonetic enhancement. These findings also contribute to the understanding of nasality as an abstract feature that involves multiple articulations.

Pitch-Range Perception: The Dynamic Interaction Between Voice Quality and Fundamental Frequency.

Effective pitch-range normalization is important to uncover intended linguistic pitch targets in continuous speech. Our previous study demonstrated that voice quality plays a role in pitch-range perception: “tense voice”, implemented as stimuli with spectral balance tilted towards higher frequency, was perceived as higher in pitch. This psychoacoustic effect is consistent with the co-variation between pitch and tense voice in production. However, a spectral balance tilted towards higher frequency is also one of the properties of creaky voice, which is often associated with low pitch in production. Therefore, this raises the possibility that manipulating the f0 range of the stimuli or changing the sex of the speaker of the stimuli can reverse the direction of the shift. This current study replicates the previous experiment with the same forcedchoice pitch classification experiment with four spectral conditions, but uses a female voice to create the stimuli. In addition, two f0 ranges are used in the current experiments, which resemble the lower range and the higher range of a female voice. Overall, the results show that spectral balance interacts with f0 range: the presence of voice quality cues affect the perception of pitch range; but, the spectrum with greater energy in the high-frequency range can be interpreted as either creaky or tense depending on the f0 range. This current study enriches our understanding of the interaction between voice quality and pitch.

Covariation between voice quality and pitch: Revisiting the case of Mandarin creaky voice

This study investigates the interaction between voice quality and pitch by revisiting the well-known case of Mandarin creaky voice. This study first provides several pieces of experimental data to assess whether the mechanism behind allophonic creaky voice in Mandarin is tied to tonal categories or is driven by phonetic pitch ranges. The results show that the presence of creak is not exclusively limited to tone 3, but can accompany any of the low pitch targets in the Mandarin tones; further, tone 3 is less creaky when the overall pitch range is raised, but more creaky when the overall pitch range is lowered. More importantly, tone 3 is not unique in this regard, and other tones such as tone 1 are also subject to similar variations. In sum, voice quality is quite systematically tied to F0 in Mandarin. Results from a pitch glide experiment further suggest that voice quality overall covaries with pitch height in a wedge-shaped function. Non-modal voice tends to occur when pitch production exceeds certain limits. Voice quality, thus, has the potential to enhance the perceptual distinctiveness of extreme pitch targets.

The influence of tonal categories and prosodic boundaries on the creakiness in Mandarin

This study examines the distribution of creaky voice as a function of various prosodic structures in a large-scale corpus of continuous speech of Mandarin. Both tonal categories and prosodic boundaries have strong effects on the likelihood of creak and relative creakiness. It was found that (1) creaky voice in Mandarin is indeed largely driven by the occurrence of low pitch and weakening; (2) Tone 3 sandhi and Tone 2 are different in both pitch and voice quality; (3) the creakiness of Tone 3 (low tone) and the neutral tone (weakening) is realized differently. Moreover, females and males do not differ in how they use creaky voice linguistically.

The effect of musicality on cue selection in pitch perception

Our previous experiments (Kuang and Liberman 2015, 2016) have shown that spectral cues have significant effects on pitch perception. One striking finding from Kuang et al. (2015) is that there is a great deal of cognitive variation among individuals: musicians are much less affected by the spectral conditions; by contrast, non-musicians heavily rely on spectral cues in pitch perception. We hypothesized that this is because musicians are more sensitive to fine f0 difference. Extending from this finding, our present study examines whether the degree of musicality of a given speaker have effects on his/her strategies of perceiving pitch. The current experiment consists of two parts: musicality tests and pitch classification test (as in Kuang and Liberman 2016). It is found that the people with higher musicality scores tend to more heavily attend to f0 cues than the people with much lower musicality scores do. This result supports our hypothesis, and has important implications for tone acquisition.

Modeling the cross-linguistic variations of tonal systems

This study aims to simulate the cross-linguistic variations of tonal systems with low dimensional models. Individual syllables of Mandarin, Yoruba, southern Yi, and Hmong were retrieved from existing speech corpora. Voice quality measures as well as f0 were extracted for all data. For each language, Functional Principal Component Analysis (FPCA) is used to parameterize the f0 contours of individual syllables. It is found that three FPCs are sufficient to account for more than 90% of the variance for pitch contours for all languages. Moreover, the same FPCs are shared among tonal languages and appear to be phonologically meaningful: FPC1 is related to the pitch range; FPC2 is related to the direction of the contour (e.g. rising or falling); FPC3 is related to more complex contours such as dipping and convex. Tone classification models were built for each language, and both voice quality measures and f0 PCs were fitted into the models. Voice quality cues significantly improve the accuracy of the predictions...

Phonation in nine languages

This study compares the phonations of 9 languages. Some of the languages use phonation types contrastively, independently of any pitch contrasts (Gujarati: modal, breathy; White Hmong and Black Miao: modal, breathy; Jalapa Mazatec: modal, breathy, creaky; Southern Yi, Bo, and Hani: tense, lax), while some use phonation as correlates of pitch contrasts (White Hmong: creaky low tone; Black Miao: creaky low tone and pressed high tone; Mandarin: creaky low and falling tones; Santiago Matatlan Zapotec and San Juan Guelavia Zapotec: creaky large-falling tone and breathy small-falling tone). Acoustic measures of phonation are compared for all 9 languages, and electroglottographic measures are compared for all but Mazatec. Multi-dimensional scaling of the production measures is then used to derive a lower-dimension phonation space, and the use of that production space by the different languages is compared. [Work supported by NSF]

Does merger happen in the three‐way contrast of Korean stops?

Most previous studies of Korean stops have focused on limited acoustic cues, e.g., VOT and F0; few have considered voice quality and if any, only H1‐H2 was mostly studied. Therefore, the question of the realization of three‐way stop contrast (lenis, aspirated, and tense) in Korean is not settled. Given that the contrast is undergoing sound change (VOT of lenis is increasing), there arises the question whether other acoustic cues also change over time to keep the three‐way contrast. Therefore, this study comprehensively investigates various acoustic measures of Korean stops from ten young Seoul speakers (five females; five males). Other than the distinctive low F0 after lenis stops and non‐distinctive VOT between lenis and aspirated stops, our preliminary results show the the following. First, females and males exhibit significantly different acoustic realizations of three types of stops. Second, compared to the other two types, lenis stops are special in the way that they have larger variations of values ...