Predicting tonal realizations in one Chinese dialect from another

Abstract

Pronunciation dictionaries are usually expensive and time-consuming to prepare for the computational modeling of human languages, especially when the target language is under-resourced. Northern Chinese dialects are often under-resourced but used by a significant number of speakers. They share the basic sound inventories with Standard Chinese (SC). Also, their words usually share the segmental realizations and logographic written forms with the SC translation equivalents. Hence the pronunciation dictionaries of northern Chinese dialects could be easily available if we were able to predict the tonal realizations of the dialect words from the tonal information of their SC counterparts. This paper applies statistical modeling to investigate the tonal aspect of the related words between a northern dialect, i.e. Jinan Mandarin (JM), and Standard Chinese (SC). Multi-linear regression models were built with between-word pitch distance of JM words as the dependent variable and the following were included as the predictors: SC tonal relations, between-dialect tonal identity, and individual backgrounds. The results showed that tonal relations in SC and between-dialect identity, as predictors featuring the relation between the JM and SC tonal systems, are significant and robust predictors of JM tonal realizations. The speakers' sociolinguistic and cognitive backgrounds, together with the tonal merge and neutral tone information within JM, are important for the prediction of JM tonal realizations and affect the way that between-language predictors take effect.

Dynamic effect of tonal similarity in bilingual auditory lexical processing

“…4 JM also has four monosyllabic citation tones: rising, high-falling, high-level and low-falling (Qian, 1997). Both dialects have limited tone sandhi patterns (Peng, 2000;Wu et al, 2017;Wu, Chen, Van Heuven, & Schiller, 2016;Wu, Chen, Van Heuven, & Schiller, 2018;Yuan & Chen, 2014). The SC and JM forms for "to own" are written with the same characters 拥有and share the same segmental structure, /ioŋ-iou/; similarly, the SC and JM forms for "thanks" are written with the same characters 谢谢 and share the segmental structure, /ɕiɛ-ɕiɛ/.…”

“…We first composed a list including 54 pairs of disyllabic SC-JM ETEs (see Appendix). Since no measurement of phonological similarity between SC-JM ETEs was available before the experiment, the first author (a trained phonetician with Putonghua Proficiency Test Certificates-Level1B) judged the words from a JM audio corpus, with 200 high-frequency and 200 low-frequency words by 42 JM speakers collected in our earlier study (Wu et al, 2016) for their different degrees of phonological similarity to their SC counterparts. Afterwards, 27 more phonologically similar and 27 phonologically less similar pairs of ETEs were selected.…”