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Contrastive Study on Tonal Patterns Between Accented and Standard

Aijun Li1, Ziyu Xiong1, Wang2

1Institute of , Chinese Academy of Social 5, Jianguomennei Dajie,,100732 {liaj,xiongzy}@cass.org.cn 2Nokia Research Center, Beijing [email protected]

Abstract. This depicts a contrastive study on tonal patterns of monosyllables and disyllabic words between Standard Chinese (SC) and three regional accented Chinese(RAC): , and . It is found that for mid level accent speakers, tonal contours of the third syllable uttered in isolation or at the final position of a prosodic constituent are always different for RAC from those of SC, displaying a less concave contour or even no concave at all. Moreover, even if the third tone contours are similar in isolation, they still may be different in final positions of -syllabic words between RAC and SC. The tonal register and range are compared among SC, RAC and , showing that the RAC tends to keep the same tonal register and range as in dialects, and tonal range is harder to change. A perceptual experiment was carried out to find the third tone perceptual patterns for 3 accented Chinese. All the results imply that third tonal production is a difficult task for some dialectal speakers. Tonal acquisition of the citation form can not completely solve all tonal acquisition problems; tonal combination pattern still needs acquisition. The tonal register and range may be harder to be acquired than tonal contours.

Keywords: tonal patterns, contrastive study, accented Chinese, tone production, tone acquisition

1. Introduction

There are 10 major groups in , namely the groups of , , , Hui, Xiang (or Hunanese), Gan, (or ), , and Hakka. People from different dialectal areas might not be able to communicate with each other simply because the differences among the dialects are so significant. So, nowadays Standard Chinese (also called Putonghua or Mandarin) is widely used all over China and is popularized by Education Ministry of China. The accented Chinese refers to the Mandarin spoken by dialectal Chinese speakers. The accented Chinese can be regarded as the inter-language in L2 acquisition theory. In the area of accented Chinese study, most researchers have focused on qualitative and phonological description on dialects in popularizing Chinese. Although some contrastive studies between two dialects or between a dialect and the SC have been published, few investigations have been carried out from the perspective of phonetics. In recent years, we have been doing phonetic analysis on accented Chinese from the view of language teaching and objective evaluation on accent levels. In paper [1], we investigated the difference between accented Shanghai Chinese and SC, finding that tonal patterns in isolation and combination are quite different between SC and accented Shanghai Chinese especially for third tone. This reminds us that there is a tendency for speakers to have tone production problem if those dialects lack the similar tonal pattern as in SC. There are many contributions on Mandarin tone acquisition. Aiming to assess whether typed natural language interaction with a computer using tone-marked Mandarin can lead to improved tone production in L2 learners of Chinese, Mitchell Peabody etc.[2] analyzed the tonal patterns of L2 learners and native Chinese teachers in continuous utterances. They found that the tone contours for the native teachers were highly consistent and predictable, but the students' tone profiles varied widely and typically bore little resemblance to the teacher targets. Wang Yue etc. made acoustic and perceptual evaluation of Mandarin tone productions before and after perceptual training for American learners. She found that post-training tone contours approximate native norms to a greater degree than pre-training tone contours. Furthermore, pitch height and pitch contour are not mastered in parallel, with the former being more resistant to improvement than the latter.[3] Studies of hemispheric processing have consistently demonstrated that Mandarin tones are processed differently by native and nonnative speakers. While for native speakers, the neural substrate underlying the ability to identify Mandarin tone is predominantly lateralized in the left hemisphere, this hemispheric specialization for lexical tone is not characteristic of nonnative speakers of Mandarin. [4] In most contributions as mentioned above, Mandarin learner’s native language (L1) is a or an accent language. But what we focus here is a special situation, i.. both source language (dialect) and target language (SC) belong to Chinese tone even if some of them may have huge discrepancy like two languages. Tseng made a contrastive investigation on the prosodic properties of intonation between Putonghua (Mandarin spoken in China) and (Mandarin spoken in Taiwan),she found that Putonghua demonstrated a general higher register than Guoyu.[5] Richard and Torgerson investigated pitch and tone register differences between native speakers of Taiwan and Beijing Mandarin by means of an acoustic analysis of three speech styles. Results suggest that tones produced in Taiwan Mandarin are in a slightly lower register than those produced in Beijing Mandarin. Speech style was not a significant predictor of pitch register in long segments of recorded speech. [6] has provided several examples of tonal differences between Taiwan and Beijing Mandarin, including the opinion that Taiwan Mandarin is characterized by the frequent use of low tones while Beijing Mandarin uses rising or high tones, a difference of tone register.[7] By comparing the tonal contours between SC and Min accented Chinese, we found mid-accent Min speakers have difficulty to produce the third , because Min dialect lacks a similar low rising contour tone as in SC.[8] In this paper we try to look more dialectal regions to contrast their tonal pattern including tonal contour, tonal range and tonal register. Three regions are selected as Shanghai, Xianmen and , among which MinNan dialect is spoken in southeast area of and also part of Taiwai. Xianmen dialect is the standard MinNan Dialect. Taipeiness speak Min or Haka, but we only focus on Min dialect speakers in this paper. Wu dialect is a group of dialects spoken in Shanghai, , southern , and part of Fujian and . Wu dialect is the second biggest dialect running after Mandarin. Shanghai dialect is regarded as the standard Wu dialect. Nowadays, most of Xianmenese, and Taipeinese also speak RAC (GUYU called in Taiwan) while communicating with non-native speakers or dealing with public affairs. RAC is an inter-language which may be put somewhere between dialect and SC. According to the outline of SC spoken skill test constituted by Chinese Ministry of Education, accent is categorized from light to heavy into 3 levels (1-3) and two sub-levels from light to heavy as A and B within each level. In this paper, we only focus on mid-accent level speakers. We hope the results will be helpful for SC learning and automatic accent-level evaluation.

2. Materials

There are three kinds of corpus concerned: SC, RAC and dialect corpus (MDC). We selected some speakers with medial accent from each sub-corpus as listed in table 1. The recorded speech includes monosyllables with 4 citation tones and disyllabic words with 16 tonal combinations. The speakers recruited from Taipei can speak both GuoYu and Taiwan Minnan dialect.

Table 1. Speaker distribution for each sub-corpus

Corpora RAC/MDC SC Shanghai(SH) 30 20 Xiamen(XM) 6 10 Taiwai (TW) 4 4

3. Lexical tone

There are four lexical tones in SC, in 5-letter tone scale, they are 55, 35, 214 and 51 respectively. The third tone is a low rising tone (concave tone) in isolation. There are 7 lexical tones in Xiamen dialect (DXM) and Taiwan Minnan dialect (DTW) with 2 checked tones (T6,T7); 5 lexical tones in Shanghai dialect (DSH) with 2 checked tones(T4, T5) as shown in table 2. So we may find that DTW, DXM and DSH don’t have a contour tone like T3 of SC.

Table 2. Phonological tones of SC, Xianmen, Shanghai and Taiwan Min dialects (in 5-letter tone scale)

languages T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 SC 55 35 214 51 XM/ TW 55 24 53 21 22 5 2 dialect SH dialect 51 13 23 5 2

4. Tonal patterns of monosyllables

Five-letter tone scale is used to analyze the tonal features i.e. =5*(F0-F0min)/ (F0max-F0min). Where X refers to the pitch value under analysis; F0max and F0min refer to the maximum and minimum of the pitch value in Semitone (100Hz as reference frequency). Tonal patterns of 4 citation tones of SC are given in Figures 1 and 2. Four citation tones of accented Shanghai Mandarin (ASH) are shown in figures 3 and 4. Four citation tones of accented Xiamen Mandarin (AXM) are shown in Figures 5 and 6. Figures 7-9 are citation tones for DXM, DTW and DSH.. Comparing these figures, we find there is no phonological difference between lexical tones of SC and ASH (Figures 3 and 4). But a significant different can be found for tone T3 of AXM and ATW (Taiwan Guoyu) speakers, whose tonal features are LLM(214) for SC (figures 1 and 2), ML(31) for AXM and ATW respectively (Figures 5,6,10,11). In this case, T3 of AXM and ATW is prone to be perceived as falling or a neutral tone in SC. By observing the speakers’ mother tones, we may explore that the mis-production of T3 is mainly caused by the lack of such kind of tone in DXM and DTW. According to the Language learning theory, the speakers will produce the new elements by the most similar elements of their own languages. Here XM and TW speakers always utter T4 of SC by a high falling tone and some of them utter T3 as a low falling without any rising gesture. By replacing the SC tone with a similar tone in their dialect, XM and TW speakers don’t need to learn any new tones. However, this brings the T3 production error. Another reason is that some speakers are not trained or don’t pay more attention to cope with this problem at all. From the above analysis, we also know that SH speakers with mid-level accent produce tonal contours better than XM and TW speakers, however, some SH speakers are observed to produce third tone as a rising tone just like T2 in DSH.

Fig. 1 Four tones for male SC speakers Fig. 2 Four tones for female SC speakers

SCuv SCv ASHuv ASHv SCuv SCv 5 ASHuv ASHv 4 5 3 4 2 3 F0(semi tone) 1 2 F0(semi tone) 0 1 high tone rising tone low tone falling tone 0 high tone rising tone low tone falling tone

Fig. 3 Averaged 4 tones for ASH (unv/ for Fig. 4 Averaged 4 tones for ASH (unv/v for unvoiced/voiced initials, female speaker) unvoiced/voiced initials,male speakers)

STCTV1 5 5 STCTV2 4 4 3 STCTV1 3 STCTV3 2 STCTV2 STCTV4 2 1 STCTV3 1 0 STCTV4 5 letter scale 5 letter scale 5 letter Normalized F0 in

Normalized F0 in Normalized 0 1357911 1357911 Normalized duration Normalized duration

Fig.5 Averaged 4 tones for AXM (female Fig. 6 Averaged 4 tones for AXM (male speakers speakers with voiced initials). with voiced initials).

5 5

4 T1 4 T1 3 T2 3 T2

调值 调值 T3 2 T3 2 T4 1 T4 1 T5 0 T5 0 1234567891011 12345678910

Fig. 7 Averaged 5 dialectal tones(T1-T5) for Fig. 8 Averaged 5 dialectal tones(T1-T5) for XM XM and TW female speakers with voiceless and TW male speakers with voiced initials. initials. 5 4 T1 3 T2 2 T3 1 T4 0 T5 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19

Fig. 9 Five dialectal tones (T1-T5) for Shanghai speakers.

Fig.10 Four tones of ATW female speakers. Fig. 11 Four tones of ATW male speakers.

5. Tonal combination patterns of bi-syllabic word

Tonal combination pattern of SC is shown from Fig. 16 to Fig. 19. There is a phonological rule in SC: T3+T3 -> T2+T3. But when a T3 is followed by another tone (except tone 3), the first T3 will become to a half T3 which loses the raising part, that is from 214 to 21 as shown in Fig.18. Tonal combination patterns of AXM speakers are shown from Figure 12 to 15. For ATW speakers, the contour patterns are almost similar to AXM and omitted here. Comparing the tonal combination patterns of bi-syllabic words we find when the second syllables bear T3, AXM and ATW speakers always utter it in a low falling pattern. When T3 is at the first syllable, they can pronounce it correctly, because the tonal pattern of this half T3 matches one of their native tones. Figure 20 gives the tonal combination pattern of ASH when the second syllable is the low tone T3, the pith contour of SC is of a falling-rising pattern, but that of ASH only has a falling process. The tonal contours of the first syllable show no obvious difference, but the second syllables in ASH present some difference from those in SC: the pitch contour of the low tone in SC is of a falling-rising pattern, but that in ASH only has a falling process. From the tonal combination patterns of ASH we found an interesting phenomenon that tonal production of the citation form can not completely solve problem of tonal combination production(regardless of tone sandhi here).

5 5 1+1 4 4 2+1 1+2 3 3 2+2 1+3 2 2 2+3 1+4 1 2+4 1 0

0 5 letter scale 1 4 7 1013161922

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 Normalized F0 in Normalized F0 in 5 letter scale Normalized duration Normalized duration

Fig. 12 T12 + four tones for XM female speakers Fig 13, T2 + four tones for XM female speakers

e 5 5 3+1 4 4 3+2 3 3+3(2+3) 3 2 3+4 2

letter scale 1 1 4+2

Normalized in F0 5 0 0 4+4 1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 Normalized F0 in 5 letter scal 1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 Normalized duration Normalized duration Fig. 14, T3 + four tones for XM female Fig 15,T4 + four tones for XM female speakers speakers

5 5 4 4 1+1 2+1 3 1+2 3 2+2 2 1+3 2 2+3 letter scale 1 1+4 1 2+4 letter scale Normalized F0 in 5 F0 Normalized 0 0 1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22

Normalized F0 in 5 1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 Normalized duration Normalized duration

Fig. 16 T1 + four tones for BJ female speakers Fig. 17 T2 + four tones for BJ female speakers

5 5

4 3+1 4 3 3+2 3 4+1 4+2 3+3 2 2 4+3 3+4 1 4+4 5 letter scale

5 letter scale 1

Normalized F0in 0 Normalized F0in 0 1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 159131721 Normalized duration Normalized duration

Fig 18. T3 + four tones for BJ Fig 19. T4 + four tones for BJ female speakers female speakers

ASHunv ASHv SCunv SCv 5 4 3 itch scale itch p 2 1 Tone 1+3 2+3 3+3 4+3

Fig. 20 Tonal combination of ASH and SC with Tn+T3 pattern

6. Tonal range and register

Besides comparing the tonal contour patterns, we contrast the tonal ranges and registers of the citation tones. The maximum value, minimum value, and tonal range in semitone are listed in Table 3. From the table, we know that ‹ Tonal ranges of SC and ASH are the widest, tonal ranges of AXM and DXM Min are narrower, while tonal range of ATW is the narrowest among four regions. ‹ For the tonal register, ASH, AXM and DSH are similar to SC, while the ATW, DTW and DXM are slightly lower, especially for male speakers. ‹ From the table we know that although the contour shapes (phonological tones) of DXM and DTW are quite similar, their tonal range are different, DXM has wider pitch range than DTW. The range of DSH is wider than DTW and DXM, the register of DSH is the highest among the three dialects. ‹ We can also conclude from the table that although the accented speakers may have no problems to produce tonal contours, they may have difficulties to change their tonal range and register to SC, such as TW Min speakers keep their tonal range and register in ATW as in DTW, however, tonal range seems harder to change than register, such as XM speakers try to keep their tonal range in AXM while they can change their register more close to SC. For ASH speakers, it seems that they can change both register and range close to SC. This illustrates, if we only take tonal patterns for granted, that among three accented Chinese, ASH is more close to SC, AXM is in the middle, while ATW is far from SC.

Table 3. F0max, F0min and tonal ranges of monosyllables (in Semitone,100 Hz as reference f0, M: male F: Female)

Language Regions F0max F0min F0range variants Standard SC-F 17.3723 1.045299 16.327 Chinese SC-M 10.6723 -2.8077 13.48 AXM-F 18.71 6.50 12.21 AXM-M 9.21 -0.07 9.28 Accented ASH-F 16.2823 2.532299 13.75 Chinese ASH-M 9.142299 -3.3077 12.45 ATW-F 16.33 9.26 7.07 ATW-M 5.06 -3.07 8.13 DTW-F(Minnan) 16.11 9.50 6.61 DTW-M(Minnan) 4.25 -2.91 7.15 DXM-F(Minnan) 16.92 4.52 12.40 Dialects DXM-M(Minnan) 6.17 -5.61 11.79 DSH-F 18.679 8.739 9.94 DSH-M 11.235 -0.104 11.339

7. Perceptual experiment on Mandarin third tone

To take a further look at the third tone of accented Chinese with mid level accent, a perceptual experiment on third tone is carried out. We selected some third tone syllables (total 241) in the corpus read by Beijing, Xiamen, Shanghai and Taiwan speakers (total 18). The speaker and syllable number distributions for each region are listed in Table 4. Five subjects are invited from Institute of Linguistics, who speak Standard Chinese and who don’t know the aim of our experiment. When listening to the randomly played syllables, the subjects have to judge if it is standard Chinese or accented Chinese, if the syllable tone is tone 2, tone 3, tone 4 or ‘uncertain’. Table 4 gives the perceptual result for subject 1(details for other subjects are omitted here for the limited space). From table 4, we know that tone 3 of Beijing speakers are 100% correctly judged. For Xiamen speakers, except XM-F02, most third tones are judged as tone 4 or uncertain. For Shanghai speakers, many are judged as second tone or uncertain. For Taiwan speakers, except TW-F02, most third tones are judged as tone 4 or uncertain. Table 5 shows the average results for all 5 subjects. From ANOVA analysis, we know that significant difference exists among 4 regions (P=0.0<0.05), significant difference exist among 5 subjects for tone 2(p=0.004<0.05) and ‘uncertain’ (p=0.017<0.05) judgements, but no significant difference exists for tone 3 and tone 4 judgements (p=0.189, p=0.257> 0.05). Multivariate test also shows that both speakers of Beijing and Shanghai have no significant discriminations (P>0.05), while both speakers of Xiamen and Taiwan have significant discriminations (p<0.05). For Taiwan speakers, TW-F02 is classified to a separate group according to correct results, this speaker can produce third tone quite well; for Xiamen speakers, XM-F02 and XM-F01 belong to two separate groups respectively, others to the third group. XM-F02 can correctly produce the third tone. Three region groups can be clustered on the correct judgment percentage on third tone as shown in table 6, TW and XM belong to the same group and SH and BJ to other two separate groups. In Figure 21, an overall pattern of perceptual results on third tone is displayed, from which we know that TW and XM speakers share a common pattern: 20-30% are corrected produced and 35-40% are produced as tone 4, more than 10% can not be perceived to any tone of SC (‘uncertain’). For Shanghai speakers, about 50% third tones are correctly produced, while about 35% are produced as the second tones, more than 10% can’t be decided (‘uncertain’), this suggest that some shanghai speakers should have tonal alignment problems on third tone production, which is caused by their dialectal tone.

Table 4. The perceptual result on tone 3 syllable of 4 regions for subject 1.(F: female speaker, M: male speaker,)

Regions Speakers syll. No. Tone2(%) Tone3(%) Tone4(%) Uncertain BJ-F03 11 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 BJ-F05 11 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 Beijing BJ-M01 10 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 BJ-M03 11 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 XM-M04 22 0.00 0.00 90.91 9.09 XM-M05 21 4.76 0.00 57.14 38.10 Xiamen XM-F01 13 7.69 15.38 38.46 38.46 XM-F02 16 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 XM-F03 14 0.00 0.00 78.57 21.43 SH-F02 10 30.00 70.00 0.00 0.00 SH-F03 10 20.00 70.00 0.00 10.00 Shanghai SH-F05 4 50.00 25.00 0.00 25.00 SH-M03 31 25.81 54.84 0.00 19.35 SH-M04 21 66.67 9.52 0.00 23.81 TW-M01 9 0.00 0.00 55.56 44.44 TW-M02 9 0.00 0.00 1.00 0.00 Taiwan TW-F01 9 0.00 11.11 22.22 66.67 TW-F02 9 22.22 77.78 0.00 0.00

Table 5. Perceptual results on third tone for all 5 subjects

Subjects Regions Tone2(%) Tone3(%) Tone4(%) Uncertain Subject1 BJ 0 100 0 0 XM 2.33 20.93 55.81 20.93 SH 38.16 44.74 0.00 17.11 TW 5.56 22.22 44.44 27.78 Subject2 BJ 27.91 72.09 0.00 0.00 XM 3.49 58.14 9.30 29.07 SH 51.32 32.89 0.00 15.79 TW 2.78 19.44 58.33 19.44 Subject3 BJ 0.00 95.35 0.00 4.65 XM 6.98 36.05 40.70 16.28 SH 44.74 30.26 0.00 25.00 TW 19.44 16.67 61.11 2.78 Subject4 BJ 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 XM 1.16 27.91 70.93 0.00 SH 19.74 78.95 0.00 1.32 TW 2.78 19.44 75.00 2.78 Subject5 BJ 0.00 100.00 0.00 0.00 XM 2.33 47.67 30.23 19.77 SH 40.79 55.26 0.00 3.95 TW 11.11 13.89 61.11 13.89

Table 6, Cluster for result of TONE3 judgments (Student-Newman-Keuls) Alpha = .05. N Subset Regions 1 2 3 Taiwan 20 18.334000 Xiamen 25 27.264800 Shanghai 25 51.720400 Beijing 20 93.455000 Estimated Marginal Means of TONE2 Estimated Marginal Means of TONE3 40 100

80 30

60 s s

n 20 ea ean

l M 40 a al M in in rg a 10 arg M M

20 te a ated stim

0 stim E

E 0 BJ SH TW XM BJ SH TW XM GROUP GROUP

Estimated Marginal Means of TONE4 Estimated Marginal Means of 'Uncertain' 50 20

40

30 s s

n 10 a e ean

20 l M a al M in in rg a arg M M 10 d te a ated stim stim 0 0 E E BJ SH TW XM BJ SH TW XM GROUP GROUP

Fig. 21 Distribution of perceptual results among 4 regions.

8. Discussion and Summary

The contribution of this comparative study is that we take phonetic approach to get some social-linguistic result, which will be useful for Standard Chinese learning and accent level evaluation for accented Chinese speakers. In [6], it has been shown that a significant dialectal tone register difference exists between SC and Taiwan Mandarin. We found that differences exist on tone contour and range between SC and Taiwan Mandarin speakers as well. It was reported that tonal acquisition is the biggest problem for foreigners to learn Standard Chinese, especially for the third tones. It is prosodic problems rather than segmental problems (initials and finals) that cause the “foreign accent” [9]. From perceptual and productive research, English speakers confuse tone 2 with tone3 [3]. However, in this study, we find even for a Chinese, a tonal production problem still exist when the speaker’s mother tone lacks a tone similar to the third contour tone of SC. The contour tone production problem always occurs before a prosodic phrase boundary or as an isolated syllable. Furthermore, range and register production seems hard to produce (acquire), the former is harder to change as in[3], one of the reason is related to articulatory habits, besides, tone range and register have no function to distinguish the meanings of the spoken words. The perceptual experiment supports the acoustic analysis on the citation tone for XM, TW and SH speakers, i.e. XM and TW speakers tend to produce the third tone of SC as falling tone, however, some SH speakers have a tendency to produce the third tone to the rising tone perceived as second tone in SC. The reason is that the speaker’s mother tone system (dialect) lacks of Mandarin third tone pattern, they try to use a similar tone from their mother tone system to substitute the Mandarin third tone. However, Shanghainess are easy to produce tonal alignment errors which cause their third tone as rising tone. Tonal acquisition of the citation form can not completely solve all tonal acquisition problems; tonal combination pattern still needs acquisition. From the analysis, we may deduce that this tonal production problem must present in other dialectal regions if the phonological system of those dialects lack the original low rising tone as third tone in Standard Chinese. But how about the situation for young children and can their articulatory habits of tone register and range be easily changed during language learning? This study encourages the future research on this topic. Acknowledgement: Thanks Wenjing for Shanghai data labelling. This project was funded by Nokia research center, the Ministry of Education Project no. ZDI105-B02 and Project 2004AA114011-1 of China’s National 863 Project.

References

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