Re: AP in all of us? New evidence from speech research (lonce wyse )


Subject: Re: AP in all of us? New evidence from speech research
From:    lonce wyse  <lwyse(at)MINDMAKER.COM>
Date:    Thu, 10 May 2001 10:10:43 +0800

Hi - Chinese is a tonal language, but it is *possible* to understand Chinese without the pitch information: 1) Chinese speakers whisper, too! (However, there are formant changes correlated with pitch in speech) 2) Chinese songs are almost completely devoid of the lexical tonal information. (However, songs are special in their use of language - especially regarding redundancy) 3) Tones are often sacrificed in natural speech (albeit using pragmatic and contextual "rules") 4) Monotone computer speech synthesis is also understandable - by both humans and machines - due to joint word frequency statistics as well as semantic context. Aren't there any native Chinese speakers who want to "pitch in" here? I would be interested to know if deaf-from-birth people learn to speak with tones at all. Regards, - lonce p.s. Related topic: I believe Bruno Repp (among others) found that pitch in Chinese is processed in areas of the brain associated with language rather than with music. Tom Brennan wrote: > Now let me make another comment on pitch. Languages such as Chinese people > speak do absolutely require control of pitch so what you have said about > speech not requiring pitch control is patently untrue for some speech. I cannot > comment on speech training of Chinese deaf as I have no first hand experience > with it. >


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Electrical Engineering Dept., Columbia University