The role of creaky voice in Cantonese tonal perception

Abstract

There are few studies on the role of phonation cues in the perception of lexical tones in tonal languages where pitch is the primary dimension of contrast. This study shows that listeners are sensitive to creaky phonation in native tonal perception in Cantonese, a language in which the low falling tone, Tone 4, has anecdotally been reported to be sometimes creaky. First, in a multi-speaker corpus of lab speech, it is documented that creak occurs systematically more often on Tone 4 than other tones. Second, for stimuli drawn from this corpus, listeners identified Tone 4 with 20% higher accuracy when it was realized with creak than when it was not. Third, in a two-alternative forced choice task of identifying stimuli as Tone 4 or Tone 6 (the low level tone) isolating creak from any concomitant pitch cues, listeners had a higher proportion of Tone 4 responses for creaky stimuli. Finally, listeners had more Tone 4 responses for creaky stimuli with longer durations of nonmodal phonation. These results underscore that differences in voice quality contribute to human perception of tone alongside f0. Automatic tonal recognition and clinical applications for tone would benefit from attention to voice quality beyond f0 and pitch.

Covariation between voice quality and pitch: Revisiting the case of Mandarin creaky voice

“…For example, similar to Mandarin, creaky voice is also often accompanied by tone 6 in Cantonese (Yu and Lam, 2014); mid-laryngealization/creaky voice is an important cue for several tones in Northern Vietnamese (Brunelle, 2009); and breathy voice co-occurs with White Hmong high-falling tone (Esposito, 2012;Garellek et al, 2013) and Green Mong mid-falling tone (Andruski and Ratliff, 2000). When phonation covaries with tones, the situation is trickier because the interaction between the non-modal phonation and pitch is less clear.…”

“…When phonation covaries with tones, the situation is trickier because the interaction between the non-modal phonation and pitch is less clear. Perception studies have shown that the relative importance of creaky voice in Mandarin (Yang, 2011) and Cantonese (Yu and Lam, 2014) is less important than F0 cues, but mid-laryngealization/creak in Northern Vietnamese plays a much more important role (Brunelle, 2009) than F0, and breathy voice in White Hmong (Garellek et al, 2013) and Green Mong (Andruski and Ratliff, 2000) is a primary cue for the particular tonal categories. In some more complicated cases, such as Black Miao (Kuang, 2013), for tones 11 and 55, non-modal phonation is an optional or allophonic cue; but for tone 33, non-modal phonation is a primary cue.…”

Voice quality and tone identification in White Hmong

“…In such cases, it is not always clear whether listeners pay attention only to phonation, only to pitch, or to phonation as well as pitch. Studies of a few languages have begun to show that sometimes listeners do attend to phonation, even when it is correlated with pitch (BelotelGreni e and Greni e, 1997; Brunelle, 2009;Brunelle and Finkeldey, 2011;Yu and Lam, 2011;Brunelle, 2012). But in other cases, listeners do not attend to phonation (notably breathiness), preferring pitch information exclusively (Brunelle, 2009;Brunelle and Finkeldey, 2011;Brunelle, 2012).…”

Online processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin: Evidence from ERPs

“…At the sentential level, F0 is also used to convey post-lexical information, for example, intonation types (e.g., question intonation, statement intonation) (Ladd, 2008). Although other acoustic correlates (such as duration, intensity and phonation) have also been shown to contribute to cue tonal and intonational contrasts (Garellek et al, 2013;Hu, 1987;Shi, 1980;Xu, 2009;Yu and Lam, 2014), F0 has been identified as the primary acoustic correlate of both tone and intonation in Mandarin (Ho, 1977;Shen, 1985;Wu, 1982;Xu and Wang, 2001;Xu, 2004). It may therefore not be surprising that tone and intonation interact with each other both in production and perception.…”