Universality and language-specific experience in the perception of lexical tone and pitch

Two experiments focus on Thai tone perception by native speakers of tone languages (Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin), a pitch–accent (Swedish), and a nontonal (English) language. In Experiment 1, there was better auditory-only and auditory–visual discrimination by tone and pitch–accent language speakers than by nontone language speakers. Conversely and counterintuitively, there was better visual-only discrimination by nontone language speakers than tone and pitch–accent language speakers. Nevertheless, visual augmentation of auditory tone perception in noise was evident for all five language groups. In Experiment 2, involving discrimination in three fundamental frequency equivalent auditory contexts, tone and pitch–accent language participants showed equivalent discrimination for normal Thai speech, filtered speech, and violin sounds. In contrast, nontone language listeners had significantly better discrimination for violin sounds than filtered speech and in turn speech. Together the © Cambridge University Press 2014. The online version of this article is published within an Open Access environment subject to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. 0142-7164/14 Applied Psycholinguistics 36:6 1460 Burnham et al.: Perception of lexical tone and pitch results show that tone perception is determined by both auditory and visual information, by acoustic and linguistic contexts, and by universal and experiential factors. In nontone languages such as English, fundamental frequency (F0; perceived as pitch) conveys information about prosody, stress, focus, and grammatical and emotional content, but in tone languages F0 parameters also distinguish clearly different meanings at the lexical level. In this paper, we investigate Thai tone perception in tone (Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin), pitch–accent (Swedish), and nontone (English) language participants. While cues other than F0 (e.g., amplitude envelope, voice quality, and syllable duration) may also contribute to some lesser extent to tone production and perception, F0 height and contour are the main distinguishing features of lexical tone. Accordingly, tones may be classified with respect to the relative degree of F0 movement over time as static (level) or dynamic (contour). In Central Thai, for example, there are five tones: two dynamic tones, [khǎ:]-rising tone, meaning “leg”; and [khâ:]-falling tone, “to kill”; and three static tones, [khá:]-high tone, “to trade”; [kha:]-mid tone, “to be stuck”; and [khà:]-low tone, “galangal, a root spice.” Tone languages vary in the number and nature of their lexical tones; Cantonese has three static and three dynamic tones, and Mandarin has one static and three dynamic tones. Another important variation is between tone and pitch– accent languages; in tone languages, pitch variations occur on individual syllables, whereas in pitch–accent languages, it is the relative pitch between successive syllables that is important. In Swedish, for example, there are two pitch accents that are applied to disyllabic words. Pitch Accent 1 is the default “single falling” or acute tone; for example, anden (single tone) [′ andɛ̀n] meaning “duck.” Pitch Accent 2 is the “double” or grave tone, which is used in most native Swedish nouns that have polysyllabic singular forms with the principal stress on the first syllable; for example, anden (double tone) [′ andɛ̂n] meaning “spirit.” However, while pitch accent is used throughout Swedish spoken language, there are only about 500 pairs of words that are distinguished by pitch accent (Clark & Yallop, 1990). Figure 1 shows the F0 patterns over time of the languages of concern here (Thai, Mandarin, and Cantonese tones) and the two Swedish pitch accents. To describe the tones in these languages, both in Figure 1 and throughout the text, we apply the Chao (1930, 1947) system in which F0 height at the start and end (and sometimes in the middle) of words is referred to by the numbers 1 to 5 (1 = low frequency, 5 = high frequency), in order to capture approximate F0 height and contour. Tone languages are prevalent; they are found in West Africa (e.g., Yoruba and Sesotho), North America and Central America (e.g., Tewa and Mixtec), and Asia (e.g., Cantonese, Mandarin, Thai, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and Burmese). Pitch–accent languages are found in Asia (Japanese and some Korean dialects) and Europe (Swedish, Norwegian, and Latvian). Tone and pitch–accent languages comprise approximately 70% of the world’s languages (Yip, 2002) and are spoken by more than 50% of the world’s population (Fromkin, 1978). Psycholinguistic investigations of tone perception fail to match this prevalence. Here, we contribute Applied Psycholinguistics 36:6 1461 Burnham et al.: Perception of lexical tone and pitch 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 (a) (b) 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600 650 700 750 F 0 (H z) Duration (msec.) F0 Distribution of 5 Bangkok Thai Tones Mid-[ma:]33 Low-[ma:]21 Falling-[ma:]241 High-[ma:]45 Rising-[ma:]315 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600 650 700 750 F 0 (H z) Duration (msec.) F0 Distribution of 4 Mandarin Tones High-[ma]55 Rising-[ma]35 Dipping-[ma]214 Falling-[ma]51 Figure 1. (a) Fundamental frequency (F0) distribution of Thai tones, based on five Thai female productions of “ma” (described by Chao values as follows: Mid-33, Low-21, Falling-241, High45, and Rising-315). (b) F0 of Mandarin tones, based on four Mandarin female productions of “ma” (described by Chao values as follows: High-55, Rising-35, Dipping-214, and Falling51). (c) F0 distribution of Cantonese tones, based on two Cantonese female productions of “si” (described by Chao values as follows: High-55, Rising-25, Mid-33, Falling-21, Low-Rising-23, and Low-22). (d) F0 distribution of Swedish pitch accents (across two syllables) based on three Swedish female productions for two-syllable words. Pitch Accent 1 shows the single falling F0 pattern and Pitch Accent 2 shows the double peak in F0. Applied Psycholinguistics 36:6 1462 Burnham et al.: Perception of lexical tone and pitch 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 (c) (d) 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600 650 700 750 F 0 (H z) Duration (msec.) F0 Distribution of 6 Cantonese Tones High-[si]55 Rising-[si]25 Mid-[si]33 Falling-[si]21 Low Rising-[si]23 Low-[si]22 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 F 0 (H z) Duration (msec.) F0 Distribution of 2 Swedish Pitch Accents (Across 2 Syllables) PitchAccent1 PitchAccent2