Week 4 (February 3 – 7, 2014)

Research on Tonal Error Analysis

From linguistics point of view, tonal language is the type of language that uses pitch to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning [1]. Chinese is one of the most widely spoken tonal languages, which uses tone to distinguish the meaning of word. There are five tones in Chinese. They are tone 1 (a high level tone), tone 2 (a tone starting with mid pitch and rising to a high pitch), tone 3 (a low tone with a slight fall), tone 4 (a short, sharply falling tone, starting high and falling to bottom of the speaker’s vocal range) as well as tone 5(a very short, neutral tone, has no specific contour and its pitch depends on the tones of the preceding and following syllables) [2]. Tone usually combines with a syllable to produce different words. For example, Hanyu Pinyin “mā”  means “妈” (mum) in Chinese whereas “má”  may refers to Chinese character “麻” (hemp). In this project, most of the speakers participated in the data collection of are non-tonal language (i.e. English) speakers. Thus, it is necessary to investigate the trend of tonal error in this project.The tonal error analysis is designed to investigate the distribution of tonal error of the entire corpus.

 

Reference:

[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Tone_(linguistics).html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Mechanics