Marc Brunelle

Tone perception in Northern and Southern Vietnamese

Abstract The experiment presented in this paper shows that Northern and Southern Vietnamese tones in isolation are identified by listeners through a small set of acoustic properties. Each of these perceptual cues is used for more than one tone, which suggests that listeners establish economical patterns of perceptual contrast. Although the two dialects under study share common identification cues, they also exhibit differences, especially with respect to the use of voice quality, which is an important cue in Northern Vietnamese but only plays a limited role in Southern Vietnamese. Results further suggest that Southern Vietnamese listeners can adjust their perception strategies to northern cues, which is expected since Northern Vietnamese is the standard national variety. Interestingly, the phonetic properties of tones (perceptual or acoustic) do not match the phonologically active tone classes of Vietnamese. Based on these results, previous models of Vietnamese tone features are challenged and a model of abstract tonal categories associated with a flexible phonetic knowledge is argued for.

A Laryngographic and Laryngoscopic Study of Northern Vietnamese Tones

A laryngographic and laryngoscopic study of tone production in Northern Vietnamese, a language whose tones combine both fundamental frequency (f0) modulations and voice qualities (phonation types), was conducted with 5 male and 5 female speakers. Results show that the f0 contours of Northern Vietnamese tones are not only attributable to changes in vocal fold length and tension (partly through changes in larynx height), but that f0 drops are also largely caused by the glottal configurations responsible for the contrastive voice qualities associated with some of the tones. We also find that voice quality contrasts are mostly due to glottal constriction: they occasionally involve additional ventricular fold incursion and epiglottal constriction, but these articulations are usually absent.

Dialect experience and perceptual integrality in phonological registers: Fundamental frequency, voice quality and the first formant in Cham

The perceptual integrality of f0, F1 and voice quality is investigated by looking at register, a phonological contrast that relies on these three properties in three dialects of Cham, an Austronesian language of Mainland Southeast Asia. The results of a Garner classification experiment confirm that the three acoustic properties integrate perceptually and that their patterns of integrality are similar in the three dialects. Moreover, they show that dialect-specific sensitivity to acoustic properties can cause salient dimensions to override weaker ones. Finally, the patterns of integrality found in Cham suggest that auditory integrality is not limited to acoustically similar properties.

Re-assessing tonal diversity and geographical convergence in Mainland Southeast Asia

Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) is often described as the quintessential Sprachbund, or language area, in which languages belonging to different language families converge as a result of contact (Alieva 1984; Enfield 2005). While we hold this to be true in a general sense, we suspect that there is little to be gained in arguing about what defines a language area or in determining the exact boundary of this language area (e.g., should it just include the mainland or insular Southeast Asia as well?). What seems much more interesting to us is to gain a better understanding of how convergence happens for specific features, especially phonological and phonetic features. In this paper, we look in detail at a specific phonological feature, tone, and at two of its phonetic correlates, pitch and voice quality. Based on a database of 197 languages and dialects (§2), we assess the extent of tonal diversity in MSEA languages (§3) and construct a statistical model of the degree to which tonal inventories can be predicted on the basis of geographic proximity, genealogical relatedness and population size (§4).

Tone and Phonation in Southeast Asian Languages

Southeast Asia is often considered a quintessential Sprachbund where languages from five different language phyla have been converging typologically for millennia. One of the common features shared by many languages of the area is tone: several major national languages of the region have large tone inventories and complex tone contours. In this paper, we suggest a more fine-grained view. We show that in addition to a large number of atonal languages, the tone languages of the region are actually far more diverse than usually assumed, and employ phonation type contrasts at least as often as pitch. Along the same lines, we argue that concepts such as tone and register, while descriptively useful, can obscure important underlying similarities and impede our understanding of the behavior of phonetic properties, typological regularities, and diachrony. We finally draw the readers attention to some issues of current interest in the study of tone and phonation in Southeast Asia and describe some technical developments that are likely to allow researchers to address new lines of research in years to come.

Stress and phrasal prominence in tone languages: The case of Southern Vietnamese

There is no consensus on the nature, or even the existence, of Vietnamese word stress. While some authors have proposed that it is morphosyntactically conditioned (Thompson 1963 , Thompson 1965 , Cao 2003 [1978], Ngo 1984 ), others have adopted the view that it is consistently word-final (Trần 1967 ; Nguyễn & Ingram 2006 , 2007b; Phạm 2008 ; Nguyễn 2010 ) or that it lacks stress altogether (Emeneau 1951 ). This is due to the elusive nature of word prominence in Vietnamese, and to the small number of studies that tackle the issue experimentally. In this paper, acoustic experiments designed to test previous hypotheses and tease apart possible types of prominence are presented. Southern Vietnamese disyllabic words with various morphosyntactic structures were recorded in controlled environments to test for stress and phrasal effects. Their duration, mean intensity, mean f0, f0 range and formants were then measured to assess word prominence. Results suggest that there is little evidence for word stress in Southern Vietnamese and that reports of final stress can be reinterpreted as phrase-final lengthening. Focus-marking strategies bring no additional evidence for the existence of stress, but they seem to be partly speaker- and tone-specific, which supports results obtained in studies of Northern Vietnamese (Michaud 2005 ).

Intonational phrase marking in Southern Vietnamese

Earlier studies of Vietnamese prosody, which, to a single exception, looked at the Northern dialect, portray a language in which intonation is weak, variable and idiosyncratic. The intonational targets typically proposed in autosegmentalmetrical models (boundary tones, pitch-accents) have remained elusive. This may very well be due to the fact that almost all previous experimental work was conducted on relatively unnatural read speech; in fact, research conducted on natural conversations has revealed that intonation may surface in peripheral areas of grammar where lexical tone plays a low functional role, like backchannels and repair utterances. In this short paper, an eight-hour corpus of Southern Vietnamese spontaneous speech is used as a basis for investigation. I first show that, just as in Northern Vietnamese, there is little evidence for strongly phonologized boundary tones in Southern Vietnamese. I then put forward evidence that although an effect of intonation is seen in discursive monosyllabic utterances, this effect seems more optional and less categorical than in Northern Vietnamese.

Inconspicuous coarticulation: A complex path to sound change in the tone system of Hanoi Vietnamese

Abstract In Hanoi Vietnamese, the rising and falling tones are frequently confused before the (high) level tone, even though they are clearly distinct in other contexts. In this paper, we conduct production and perception experiments designed to assess the source of this confusion. We argue that the peak of the rising tone is normally delayed onto the initial portion of the following tone, but that this peak delay lacks acoustic and perceptual salience when this following tone is a level tone. As a result, the rising tone before a level tone is often perceived as a falling tone. Although we rule out the possibility that the tonal pattern under investigation is a phonological alternation, we propose that the complex coarticulatory and perceptual mechanisms that underlie it could account for the development of other instances of regressive tone sandhi.

Phonotactic restrictions condition the realization of vowel nasality and nasal coarticulation: Duration and airflow measurements in Québécois French and Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract This study examines the nasal airflow and duration patterns of vowels and nasal appendices in Quebecois French (QF) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in order to determine if phonotactic restrictions on nasal and nasalized vowels have an influence on the realization of nasality contrasts. Results show that QF nasal vowels in syllables with more possible contrastive structures (Ṽ

Southeast Asian tone in areal perspective

vs. VN