The Language-specific Use of Fundamental Frequency Rise in Segmentation of an Artificial Language: Evidence from Listeners of Taiwanese Southern Min

Abstract

Experience with native-language prosody encourages language-specific strategies for speech segmentation. Conflicting findings from previous research suggest that these strategies may not be abstracted away from the acoustic manifestation of prosodic features in the native speech. Using the artificial language learning paradigm, the current study explores this possibility in connection with listeners of a lexical tone language called Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). In TSM, the only rising lexical tone occurs almost only on the final syllable of the language’s tone sandhi domain and is phonetically associated with final lengthening. Based on these observations, Experiment I examined what constituted a sufficient finality cue for use by TSM listeners to support segmentation: (a) final fundamental frequency (F0) rise only; or (b) final F0 rise conjoined with final lengthening. The results showed that segmentation was inhibited by the former cue but facilitated by the latter. Experiment II showed that the facilitation cannot be attributed entirely to final lengthening, as a null effect was found when final lengthening was the sole prosodic cue to segmentation. It is thus assumed that acoustic details as fine-grained as the lengthening of the rising tone are involved in the modulation of the segmentation strategy whereby TSM listeners perceive F0 rise as signaling finality. The inhibitory effect of final F0 rise alone found in Experiment I motivated Experiment III, which revealed that initial F0 rise in the absence of lengthening cues improved TSM listeners’ segmentation. It is speculated that such use of initial F0 rise might reflect a cross-linguistic segmentation solution.

The use of tonal coarticulation in segmentation of artificial language speech: A study with Mandarin listeners

“…LogRT was significant as well, indicating an inverse correlation between response accuracy and latency (i.e., faster responses were more likely to be correct than slower ones). As suggested in Ou and Guo (2019), this correlation might be merely an artifact of response certainty: as the two stimuli were separated by 500 ms of silence, listeners might be ready to respond if they were sure that the first stimulus was an AL word or a partword. Most importantly, there was a significant main effect of condition, which indicated that response accuracy in the incongruent- cues condition (mean: 57.58%) was generally lower than that in the single-cue one (mean: 63.38%).…”

“…First, the order in which a given trial appeared in the test (trial) was included to control for possible fatigue or practice effects. Second, as recommended in Ou and Guo (2019), the log-transformed reaction time (LogRT) was included to capture any potential trade-offs between response accuracy and latency. Both trial and LogRT were centered and scaled.…”

“…They found that Korean listeners' segmentation improved as the L tone in the tonal sequence became phonetically lower and more closely resembled the canonical realization of the AP-initial L tone in Korean. A related case was reported in Ou and Guo's (2019) study with TSM listeners. TSM is a tone language with an extensive tone sandhi process that restricts its only rising tone to the final position of the tone sandhi domain.…”

“…This study investigates the role of tonal coarticulation in the segmentation of continuous speech. Previous work has demonstrated that subtle acoustic-phonetic details are exploited in solving segmentation problems (e.g., Cho et al, 2007;Gow & Gordon, 1995) and can even modulate the use of segmentation strategies motivated by the distribution of a phonological entity (e.g., Ou & Guo, 2019;Tremblay et al, 2019). To extend this line of work, we examined the effect of tonal carryover assimilation, a cross-linguistically attested type of tonal coarticulation, on Mandarin listeners' segmentation with two AL learning experiments.…”

Uncovering Tonal and Temporal Correlates of Phrasal Prominence in Medʉmba

“…In a number of tone languages, rising contours also appear to be relegated to phrase-final position (Coupe, 2007;Goldsmith, 1988;Michaud & Vaissière, 2015; see also Ou & Guo, 2020), perhaps owing to the facilitative effects of prosodic boundary lengthening on the production of rising tones. We note that this natural connection between F0 rise, duration, and phrase boundaries may contribute to the salience of rising F0 as a marker of perceptual prominence across languages, as has been documented in two other papers in this volume, both tonal and non-tonal (see Ou &Guo, 2020, for Taiwanese Southern Min, andDestruel &Féry, 2020, for French).…”