The six articles I was invited to comment on have each extended that recent progress in our understanding of the early development of native and non-native perception of lexical tones. The examples in (1) illustrate the lexical contrast based on the presence vs. absence of pitch accent.4 Front. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2012.09.004, Yip, M. (2002). Another potential limitation of much prior research with young children is that often only discrimination has been tested (e.g., Harrison, 2000; Mattock and Burnham, 2006; Mattock et al., 2008; Yeung et al., 2013; Liu and Kager, 2014; Hay et al., 2015; Cheng and Lee, 2018). Chomsky, N., and Halle, M. (1968). Influences of tone on vowel articulation in Mandarin Chinese. View all 8:1117. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01117, Silva, D. J. Learning pitch patterns in lexical identification by native English-speaking adults. Some use tones only for stem morphemes while others use tone to mark grammatical or morphological alternations. Older children were the participants in the other three articles, two of which examined Cantonese-learning children. Pitch perception in the first year of life, a comparison of lexical tones and musical pitch. The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication. The editor and reviewers' affiliations are the latest provided on their Loop research profiles and may not reflect their situation at the time of review. The crucial difference between tone and non-tone languages is that tone languages use contrastive pitch specifications at every level of the phonological hierarchy, whereas non-tone languages have a gap in contrastive use of pitch at the segmental level. Pitch & Tone We’ve all heard that in Mandarin, you can pronounce a single word like ‘ma’ in four ways, each giving a radically different definition. We’ve all heard that in Mandarin, you can pronounce a single word like ‘ma’ in four ways, each giving a radically different definition. Chronemes and tonemes. Cantonese-speaking children do not acquire tone perception before tone production — A perceptual and acoustic study of three-year-olds' monosyllabic tones. Japanese Tone Structure. Further research and theoretical analyses will be needed to tease them apart. The same term “pitch accent” can also refer to a lexical contrast based on the Hum. 0000001847 00000 n 13, 1–16. doi: 10.1038/41102, Tsao, F.-M. (2017). 59, S1566–S1574. Harper & Row. Liu, L., and Kager, R. (2014). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Infancy 10, 241–265. J. Phon. We investigated the L2 acquisition of pitch accent contour, tonal alignment. 5. Moreover, languages that lack lexical tones (non-tone languages) are far from devoid of systematic pitch variations. 勢アクセント）」についてです。英語は単語の中に必ず「ストレス」を持ち、それは日本語の「ピッチアクセント（高低アクセント）」とはまった … (1998). *Correspondence: Catherine T. Best, c.best@westernsydney.edu.au, Front. doi: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e32833b0a10. 0000004691 00000 n All expand beyond the issues addressed in most previous research, although five of them maintain the typical focus on Asian contour tone languages, specifically the most-often-studied language, Mandarin, and a second widely-spoken Chinese language, Cantonese. Tone. Brain Lang. Front. Some include tonemes with temporally-changing pitch trajectories (contour tone languages) while others use only level pitches (register tone languages). Front. Psychol. (2018). 0000003772 00000 n Neurosci. Thus, the concensus from a phonological point of view is that lexical tones function as segments in the languages that employ them contrastively, although they can also serve suprasegmental functions in those languages. doi: 10.1111/desc.12097, Skoruppa, K., Pons, F., Bosch, L., Christophe, A., Cabrol, D., and Peperkamp, S. (2013). 0 (2009). doi: 10.2478/psicl-2011-0011, So, C., and Best, C. T. (2014). Secondly, some articulatory studies of speech production in tone languages have demonstrated that the laryngeal gesture that produces a lexical tone is coupled with the constriction gesture for the onset consonant of the tone-bearing syllable rather than being coupled with its vowel nucleus (Gao, 2009; Mücke et al., 2012; Hu, 2016). All languages employ consonants and vowels as discrete contrastive subcomponents of the basic timing units of words (syllables). They're completely different. 9:1211. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01211, Quam, C., and Swingley, D. (2010). 0000085212 00000 n Acq. Chinese J. Phonet. Front. 5, 24–27. 0000004410 00000 n One way or another: Evidence for perceptual asymmetry in pre-attentive learning of non-native contrasts. Cognition 124, 128–142. 8:1652. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01652. 9:117. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00117, Liu, L., Ong, J. H., Tuninetti, A., and Escudero, P. (2018). Neuroreport 21, 690–694. doi: 10.1075/lllt.17.07bes, Braun, B., and Johnson, E. K. (2011). The latter finding mirrors a previously-observed discrepancy between infants' basic discrimination of a consonant contrast as compared to their later poor recognition of that same contrast when it occurs in words (Stager and Werker, 1997). doi: 10.1111/cdev.12269, Hoonhorst, I., Colin, C., Markessis, E., Radeau, M., Deltenre, P., and Serniclaes, W. (2009). 9, 88–104. 104, 353–366. Thus, Japanese, and “pitch accent” languages in general, defies the dichotomy of tone vs. non-tone languages. The terminology can be a bit confusing, because “pitch” and “tone” are used in both language and music. “Second language speech learning: theory, findings, and problems,” in Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Cross-Language Speech Research, ed W. Strange (Timonium, MD: York Press), 233–277. The non-native listeners have often been non-tonal L1 speakers naïve to the target tone language, though in a few studies their L1s have been pitch accent languages (e.g., So and Best, 2010) or other contour tone languages (e.g., So and Best, 2010, 2011, 2014; Reid et al., 2015). ^While it remains a matter of debate whether lexical pitch accent is a type of lexical tone, for heuristic purposes, languages that use only pitch accents, such as Japanese, are considered tone languages in this paper. Similarly, use of the full range of lexical tone types and systems will be needed to determine whether, when and how young non-tone language learners may shift from perceiving non-native lexical tones as potential segmental contrasts (like consonants and vowels) to assimilating them as native prosodic patterns, and on the other hand to better understand how and when young learners of tone languages begin to tease apart lexical tones (segmental tier) from not only paralinguistic indexical information (talker identity, gender, emotion etc.) These two classes of phonemes are used to differentiate between words, whose meanings can be categorically changed by switching even a single vowel or consonant, as in vs. or . Available online at: https://wals.info/chapter/13, Mattock, K., and Burnham, D. B. This set of papers individually and together advance our knowledge about the development of young children's perception and production of lexical tones, of their phonological representation of tones in words, and of the impact that speaking a native tone language may have on children's perception of lexical stress in a non-tone second language they are learning. (2006). 3. Phonology 3, 371–405. However, more recent studies have extended the investigation to word recognition and learning (Singh and Foong, 2012; Singh et al., 2014; Hay et al., 2015), including a number of papers in this Special Topic volume (e.g., Liu and Kager, 2018; Ota et al., 2018; Burnham et al., 2019; and several other papers discussed below). Chen, A., Stevens, C. J., and Kager, R. (2017). (2010). Child Dev. 86, 10–22. Dev. Front. J. However, pitch accent is different from tones. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.109, Sato, Y., Sogabe, Y., and Mazuka, R. (2009). 0000000016 00000 n Unfortunately, the nature of the evidence differs among them, making it difficult to decide among them. Last updated on February 25, 2018. Second Lang. doi: 10.3758/s13414-014-0791-3, Remijsen, B. It was pitch-accented. Nor do neurocognitive studies resolve the issue. For example, perhaps they could indicate very to maximally low pitch. OJAD is an online dictionary for Japanese language learners and teachers. In pitch-accent languages, by contrast, the specification of some accent location(s) is sufficient to predict the tonal configuration, or melody, of the entire word. Psychophys. “no language should be analyzed with pitch-accent. J. All spoken languages use pitch and contour paralinguistically, e.g., to convey information about emotions and talker gender and age. The developmental course of lexical tone perception in the first year of life. Prosodic Phonology. Lexical vs. grammatical tone: sorting out the differences. Chao (1930) numbers (“letters”) have been adopted most often, primarily but not only for Asian languages. However, even when used, Chao numbers are applied within each language relativistically, making direct comparison between tones of different languages not as straightforward as one might expect. Tones are not abstract autosegmentals. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21377, Selkirk, E. O. A., Chen, W. R., Proctor, M. I., and Derrick, D. (2016). 143 0 obj <> endobj 23 Languages that use lexical pitch accents are described as pitch accent languages, in contrast to tone/tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese and Yoruba. the percentage of syllables (or perhaps words) that require a tone feature, we might get something like the continuum in (1). in that it is predictable from the accent position. Ideally, future research should include a wider range of non-Asian languages, including register tone as well as contour tone languages, and wider variations in the functional loads and morpho-grammatical functions of lexical tones across languages. Phonological features of tone. Copyright © 2019 Best. Autosegmental Treatment of Segmental Processes in Chinese Phonology. |, http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A520288&dswid=320, Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia. So while “tone” in language is comparable to “pitch” in music, “pitch” is a more specific phenomenon where one syllable in a word is distinguished by a linguistic “tone.” This is also all separate fro… Pitch & Tone. Neuroimage 29, 515–523. 39, 585–594. Psychol. In sum, then, existing perceptual investigations also fail to provide a clear answer to the question of whether tones form a separate segmental class or instead serve as features of vowels or consonants. 25, 555–608. 12, 914–919. 0000004139 00000 n On the one end is English, where no syllables have a lexical tone vs. Mandarin at the end where only certain ‘‘neutral” tone syllables lack a lexical tone. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.07.046, Ma, W., Zhou, P., Singh, L., and Gao, L. (2017). 143 18 Front. J. Phon. Psychol. The specific sounds of a tonal language are sometimes called tonemes. Cognition 106, 1367–1381. In another study of monolingual Mandarin learners, however, 2- to 3-year-olds showed greater sensitivity to lexical tone mispronunciations than vowel or consonant mispronunciations of just-learned novel Mandarin words, whereas 4- to 5-year-olds reversed that pattern, showing greater sensitivity to vowel or consonant mispronunciations than to tone mispronunciations (Singh et al., 2015). In fully tonal languages, every word has a pitch. A system of tone-letters. Tone systems fall into two broad patterns, according to whether contour tones exist. Pitch accents sound like tones, but the difference between tones and pitch accents is that tones may completely change the meaning of a word, whereas pitch accents mostly just indicate the pitch with which … Ratliff, M. (2015). The precocious case of lexical tone. J. Acoust. Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Basically Hungarian has a very low pitch and Chinese has a very high one. Am. 33, 93–105. 1 Pitch Accent Systems Harry van der Hulst University of Connecticut 1. The difference isn't actually super big, it's about half an octave on a piano. 9:2093. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02093, Li, X., Gandour, J. T., Talavage, T., Wong, D., Hoffa, A., Lowe, M., et al. “Coupling of tone and constriction gestures in pitch accents,” in Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity, ed P. Hoolepp (Berlin: De Gruyter), 205–230. Some report a dissociation of tone processing from both consonant and vowel processing (Li et al., 2010), while others report partial dissociation of brain activation during tone vs. vowel production (Liu et al., 2006), and still others observed similar production difficulties with tones and consonants, but not with vowels, in non-fluent aphasic speakers of Mandarin (Packard, 1986). By comparison, in a study of monolingual English- and monolingual Mandarin-learning children both groups detected either tone or vowel mispronunciations of just-learned novel Mandarin words at 18 months, but only Mandarin-learning children detected the tone mispronunciations at 24 months (Singh et al., 2014).