This study investigated identification of fragmented Mandarin tones by non-native listeners. Monosyllabic Mandarin words were digitally processed to generate intact, silent-center, center-only, and onset-only syllables. The syllables were recorded with two carrier phrases such that the offset of the carrier tone and the onset of the target tone were either continuous or discontinuous in fundame...

Features of tonal co-articulation in Mandarin speech are studied with a focus on how the word boundary location affects the results. Although there are several previous works investigating how the prosodic features of syllables are affected by the surrounding syllables, most of them selected nonsense syllable sequences as speech material without specific consideration on the word boundary. In t...

Two same-different discrimination tasks were conducted to test whether Mandarin and English native speakers use visual cues to facilitate Mandarin lexical tone perception. In the experiments, the stimuli were presented in 3 modes: audioonly (AO), audio-video (AV) and video-only (VO) under the clear and two levels of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) -6dB and 9dB noise condition. If the speakers’ perc...

Prosodic cues (namely, fundamental frequency, energy and duration) provide important information for speech. For a tonal language such as Chinese, fundamental frequency (F0) plays a critical role in characterizing tone as well, which is an essential phonemic feature. In this paper, we describe our work on duration and tone modeling for telephone-quality continuous Mandarin digits, and the appli...

This paper studies the effect of word frequency and neighbourhood density on lexical tone merge in Dalian Mandarin. Monosyllabic words with two lexical falling tones (i.e. Tone1 and Tone 4) are produced by 60 native speakers from two different generations (middle-aged vs. young). The stimuli consist of three conditions: high neighbourhood density with high word frequency (HDHF), high neighbourh...

This study examines the interaction of metrical structure and tone sandhi in Ei (an endangered language spoken in Rongshui, Guangxi Province, China), focusing on tonal reduction conditioned by a foot-like prosodic structure. Our analysis shows that within a disyllabic domain, Ei tone sandhi, mainly in the form of tonal reduction, applies only to the first syllable and the second syllable remain...

Problem statement: In Thai, tone is an essential feature of a prosodic syllable to identify the meanings of that syllable or that part of word. To generate the tonal speech with natural prosody, it is needed to manage the fundamental frequency (F0) of the speech appropriately. A successful approach of structural modeling from Mandarin Chinese has been adapted to model Thai tone. Approach: The s...

tone is functionally as resistance to passive movement. it is separated into postural tone and phasic tone. phasic tone is the result of rapid stretching of a tendon and the muscle spindle, however postural tone is the result of a steady, restrained strech on muscles. hypottonia is a decreased resistance to passive movement. the term floppy is frequently used to describe hypotonic children. in ...

The goal of our study is twofold. First, the results of two approaches in a tone annotation task are presented: a manual approach provided by the system MISTRAL+ and an automatic approach provided by the system PROSOTRAN. Second, an attempt is made here to determine the number and the patterns of the Mo Piu language tones with respect to the pitch slope and the tone level. It is found that both...

The English and Kirika languages are of different linguistic backgrounds characterized by differences in their affixation processes. These pose problems second language learning. This study, therefore, investigates describing the features kirika tries to identify some areas similarities both languages. Data for study were collected analyzed using descriptive research method arranged tables. hin...