Perception and lexical encoding of tone in a restricted tone language: Developmental evidence from Limburgian

Abstract

Within the large family of tone languages, differences exist with respect to the importance and phonetic realization of tones. It remains unclear how these differences influence the acquisition and processing of lexical tone. Limburgian, spoken in the south of the Netherlands, is assumed to have lexical tone, but it has a lower functional load than for example Mandarin Chinese. Moreover, lexical tone in Limburgian is subject to an intriguing amount of surface variation [1]. We compared performance of native Limburgians to native non-tonal Dutch controls on a series of behavioral experiments: Discrimination of lexical tone in the first year of life (Exp. 1) and in adulthood (Exp. 2), and the encoding of lexical tone during word learning in toddlers and adults (Exp. 3). Our results partly deviate from previous research on tone languages like Mandarin, but are on a par with recent findings with Japanese children, suggesting that the acquisition and processing of lexical tone indeed seems to be influenced by functional load and phonetic variability.

Franconian tones fare better as tones than as feet: a reply to Köhnlein (2016)

“…Nor do they require the introduction of any theoretical apparatus not offered by phonological theory. Research has shown that F0 is the main perceptual correlate in East Limburgish (Fournier et al 2006), as well as in the Mayen and Arzbach dialects (Werth 2011: 145-234), and speakers of the Roermond dialects have been shown to be more sensitive to pitch contrasts than speakers of (non-tonal) standard Dutch (Ramachers et al 2018). Also, the salience of the tone contrast is influenced by the intonational context in the tonal dialect of Roermond, but the quantity contrast in etymologically identical words in the dialect of Weert is not (Heijmans 2003, Fournier et al 2006.…”