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Dear list,
Thank you to those who responded to my query about F0 trajectories in Mandarin. A copy of the original query is below, followed by citations of the two papers that people pointed out to me, plus an interesting comment from Jan Schnupp.
By the way, if anyone is aware of research showing that native speakers of a tone language can perceive the speech-to-song illusion in their own language, can you please let me know? We
recently showed that native speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese can perceive the song illusion in English sentences, but to our knowledge it remains to be demonstrated that native tone language speakers can experience the illusion when hearing sentences
in their own language.
Thanks,
Ani Patel
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Original query (Feb 1, 2024):
Dear List,
Is anyone aware of studies reporting empirical comparisons of speech fundamental frequency trajectories in English vs. Mandarin connected speech?
In 1982 Eady published a paper on this topic and found that
“the speech of
the Mandarin subjects displayed a greater average rate of Fo change
than that of the American subjects. The Chinese speech was also characterized by more
Fo fluctuations
(peaks and valleys) as a function of time and as a function of the number of syllables.”
(Eady, S. J. (1982). Differences in the F0 patterns
of speech: Tone language versus stress language. Language and speech,
25(1), 29-42.)
Twenty years later Keating and Kuo revisited this issue and also found some differences in F0 patterns in the two languages, but also found that the choice of speech materials can influence the results.
(Keating, P., & Kuo, G. (2012). Comparison
of speaking fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(2), 1050-1060.)
Is anyone aware of more recent studies?
Thanks,
Ani
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Papers sent in response to query:
Ding, H., Hoffmann, R., & Hirst, D. (2016). Prosodic transfer: A comparison study of F0 patterns in L2 English by Chinese speakers. In:
Proceedings of Speech Prosody (pp. 756–760). Boston, MA.
Yuan, J., & Liberman, M. (2014). F0 declination in English and mandarin broadcast news speech.
Speech Communication 65, 67–74.
From Jan Schnupp, Feb 2, 2024:
I am not aware of more recent studies, but it would surprise me if people had done much more on this given that the use of F0 as a semantic tone marker in Chinese but not in English
makes a wider range of F0 almost inevitable.
What I find interesting (and possibly under-researched), is not so much the range of F0 variation, but the extremely fast rate at which F0 rises in Chinese tone 2 or falls in tone 4. If anyone was to revisit this, then looking at the speed of F0 change would
be of interest. My hunch is that Western 2nd language learners of Chinese particularly struggle with the fast changes.
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