This paper focuses on aspects of tone in Singlish, the (mesolectal/basilectal) variety of English spoken in Singapore, which take up the claim of tone being a marked feature in contact varieties. While the source of tonal properties may well be the dominant Sinitic substrates, the actual patterning, at both word and phrase level, would appear to actually be a consequence of prosodic patterns fo...

The use of two markers of prosodic finality in French, vowel lengthening and high vowel breathiness/devoicing, were compared among statements and questions of various types (echo-questions, Wh-questions, questions with inverted subject and verb). The comparison focuses on the relation between sentence-final intonation and the other markers of finality. The intonation pattern of statements and W...

This preliminary study aimed to apply the command-response model to the analysis of disrupted intonation patterns in speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Three Cantonese PD speakers with mild prosodic impairment participated. The speech stimuli were 36 utterances (questions and statements). Productions were analyzed using the model parameters (base frequency, magnitude and onset time of each...

This study investigates the underlying tonal pattern of pitch accent, tone interaction, focus effects, and the prosodic structure of Northern Kyungsang Korean (NKK) by examining tone-syllable alignment and the realization of pitch accent in different tonal/prosodic contexts. Based on quantitative data, we propose that the underlying tone of pitch accent is H*+L and that the left edge of a proso...

A new method for generating sentence F0 contours of Mandarin speech is proposed. The method assumes the F0 contour generation process model, but generates the tone and phrase components in different ways and sums them to produce a sentence F0 contour. The tone component is generated concatenating F0 patterns of tone nuclei, which are predicted by a corpus-based scheme (binary decision trees). E...

Investigating a tone language involves careful transcription of tone on words and phrases. This is challenging when the phonological categories – the tones or melodies – have not been identified. Effects such as coarticulation, sandhi, and phrase-level prosody appear as obstacles to early elicitation and classification of tone. This article presents open source software that can assist with sol...

This paper presents the rst published results for automatic recognition of continuous Cantonese speech with very large vocabulary. The size of the vocabulary covered by this system is about the same as that encountered in the Hong Kong local Chinese newspaper, Wen Hui Bao (å×ø ). The system covers 6335 Chinese characters (r) and a large number of Chinese words (ü) can be formed by combining the...

Yuhuan Wu Chinese deletes non-final lexical tones within a small post-lexical tone domain, except HL if its syllable begins with a sonorant consonant. The explanation of this phonological specification lies in the number of tone contrasts in the location concerned (H, L, HL, ML and LH), which is higher than in syllables with a voiceless obstruent or zero onset (H, HL, LH) or in syllables beginn...

The Dutch dialect of Venlo has a lexical tone opposition comparable to the distinction between Accent I and Accent II in Scandinavian. The two word tone patterns are realised in a variety of different ways, depending on the intonation contour, on whether the word has a focus tone, and on whether it occurs finally or nonfinally in the intonational phrase (IP). Twelve such contexts are identified...