This study examines the effects of L1 tone experience and L2 learning experience on tone assimilation. It has been proposed that perceptual assimilation of segments is tied to L1 and L2 contrasts at the phonetic level for listeners without L2 experience [1] but at both phonetic and phonological levels for those with L2 experience [2]. In this examination of perceptual assimilation of lexical to...

Traditionally, the prosodic domain as has been called ‘foot’ in Mandarin Chinese is considered to be derivable from the application of Tone 3 sandhi rule. This study investigated the internal prosodic grouping of Chinese trisyllabic structures by examining multiple cues in parallel – tone coarticulation, tone sandhi application and consonant lenition. Analyses by tone coarticulation and consona...

Infants’ native and nonnative tone perception was investigated in three studies. In Study 1, 6and 9-month-old English (non-tone) and Chinese (tone) infants were tested for discrimination of Thai tones in a training procedure. Study 2 examined English and French infants’ Thai tone perception in a more natural looking/listening task. Study 3 investigated English infants’ discrimination of Mandari...

High quality video sequences are required for the evaluation of tone mapping operators and high dynamic range (HDR) displays. We provide scenic and documentary scenes with a dynamic range of up to 18 stops. The scenes are staged using professional film lighting, make-up and set design to enable the evaluation of image and material appearance. To address challenges for HDR-displays and temporal ...

Why the acrimony of the debate between these two schools of thought? Implicit vs. explicit theory The importance of not creating straw men Contrasting tone and metaphors of theoretical language Lack of familiarity on each side with other field’s recent clinical and theoretical evolution Healthy countertransferential function of “home theory” as a holding environment in the face of patients’ unc...

In recent years a great deal of effort has been expended to develop methods that determine speech quality through the use of comparative algorithms. These methods are designed to calculate an index value of quality that correlates to a mean opinion score given by human subjects in evaluation sessions. In this paper, we validate Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) ITU-T Recommendation...

Studies of the acquisition of tones in Chinese dialects have documented the early mastery of tones in terms of accuracy in children’s tonal production, suggesting that children produce the distinctive tones of their target language competently by age two or earlier (Li and Thompson 1977, J. Tse 1977, Clumeck 1980, Hsu 1996, Zhu and Dodd 2000). These studies have also revealed interesting patter...

This paper presents a method for quantitatively estimating intonation variation in Mandarin speech. Intonation variation is relative to identical lexical tone structures, and its estimation is performed on two sets of fundamental frequency ( ) contours: one for norms and the other as variants. This is done by transforming target values in pairs from the norms to the variants in which the prosod...

Improved prediction of tone components was realized in our method for synthesizing sentence fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Mandarin speech. The method is based on representing a sentence logarithmic F0 contour as a superposition of tone components on phrase components as in the case of generation process model (F0 model). The tone components are realized by concatenating their fragments...