Shakuntala Mahanta

Perception of Lexical Tones in Sylheti

Tone as a phonological category is capable of distinguishing the meanings of two lexical words by varying the pitch height and/or contour differences. In a tone language, it is indispensable for a hearer to perceive the f0 fluctuations (and the phonetic and phonological properties) associated with distinct speech signals that distinguish the lexical meanings (Yip 2004, Francis et. al 2003). To qualify as distinct tones, speech signals of (contrasting) words (with distinct tonal property, viz., high and low) must contain large enough f0 fluctuations between them so that the hearer can use the pitch difference as a cue to distinguish the lexical meanings (viz., high and low). This paper investigates the process of tone perception in Sylheti. A series of historical developments such as the loss of breathy voice contrasts, spirantization and deaffrication predominantly led to a high tone in Sylheti ([d x „drum‟ [d>d], [d x „roar/call‟) (Gope & Mahanta, 2015, 2014). The results indicate that the Sylheti speakers by and large rely on f0 fluctuation in identifying the contrastive tones. Further, the trend of perception of contrastive tones also suggest that tones in Sylheti is perceived (mostly) in categorical manner.

Tonal Alignment and Prosodic Word domain in Boro

This paper discusses the way morphological factors influence the distribution of lexical tones in Boro. Another objective of this paper is to unravel the underlying tonal nature of various prefixes and suffixes that participate in these processes. Boro is a tone language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman group. The language lexically distinguishes L and H tones. The TBU in Boro is the syllable and the lexical tone surfaces on the rightmost syllable both in derived and non-derived disyllabic words (Sarmah, 2004). The study presented here is based on data collected from 5 male speakers of Boro. The data set consisted of 175 scripted sentences containing the target words. The sentences were analysed by extracting their pitch contour using the softwarePraat5.3.04_win32 (Boersma and Weenink, 2012). Results show that tonal specification of the affixes in Boro is related to a minimally disyllabic stem condition. Suffixes surface with their tone when they follow a disyllabic stem. Otherwise they surface with the lexical specification of the stem itself. This paper tries to show how a minimally disyllabic prosodic word domain condition regulates the occurrence of tones in Boro. This paper also tries to describe the prosodic status of derived and non-derived words in Boro.

Phonetic cues to contrastive focus in Standard Colloquial Assamese

In this paper our goal is to investigate the phonetic cues of duration and pitch (F0) for contrastive focus (henceforth CF) in Standard Colloquial Assamese (henceforth SCA), spoken in the eastern part of Assam. SCA declarative utterances in non-final Phonological phrases (henceforth P-phrase) display rising pitch contours (L*HP) and the final constituent undergoes a smooth fall [1]. When a constituent is contrastively focused it forms a P-phrase with a low pitch accent (L*) and high focus boundary tone annotated with an ‘f’ immediately preceding it (fHP). It was also observed that phonetic cues such as increased pitch range and final syllable lengthening of focused sequence characterise CF [1]. In the experiment reported in this paper, longer string of sentences are considered with focus on three different constituents in order to observe the preand post-focus constituents along with the focused constituent. The results show that a constituent with CF has higher pitch and duration value compared to wide focus baseline; the pre-focus constituents though undergo pitch and duration reduction, the compression level is not statistically significant, and finally the post-focus constituents display a flattened pitch contour.

Focus marking and pitch register modification in Boro

This paper describes the prosodic aspect of prominence in Boro, a tone language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman family. The results here describe three production experiments investigating the phonological properties of Boro words occurring in contexts like wide focus, contrastive focus, corrective focus and narrow focus with emphatic particles. Boro lexically distinguishes High and Low tones and they follow the pattern of right alignment. The experiments discussed here involve words with both H and L specification. The target words were placed in carrier sentences to elicit the focus conditions mentioned above. Ten speakers of Boro were asked to produce scripted sentences containing the target words. F0 normalized pitch curves and durational values of the target words were extracted with the aid of Prosody Pro (Xu 2013) in Praat. The pitch contours of the Intonational Phrases (IP) suggest focus marking with emphatic particles results in an H* associated to the particle itself and the pitch-range of the whole IP is raised. Both contrastive focus and corrective focus are expressed by compressing the duration of the target words and by lowering the register of the whole IPs. The paper presents this as evidence to show the discrete nature of pitch register modification in Boro.

Tonal alignment in Deori

This paper reports on the results from an experiment on tone in Deori, a language spoken by about 20,000 people in Assam (India). Data from 10 speakers where the target word bearing the tonal contrast appeared in the sentence medial position is presented. Time-normalized pitch of different words shows that words may have a lexically specified high or low tone. A high tone may contrast with a low tone, but its phonetic implementation of rise or fall in a disyllabic word depends on whether the syllable on which the contrast appears is initial or final. A tonal contrast on the first syllable leads to a falling contour, but when the contrastive tone appears on the second syllable of a disyllabic word then the tonal contour is falling. Exceptions to this pattern appear in closed disyllables where a steep rise in either the low or high tone is not observed. A high or a low tone may also contrast with a word which is not specified with any tone, in which case there is no rise or fall. Statistical analyses show t...