Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Acoustic and Articulatory Study of Burmese Tone

Georgetown University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Many languages use tone, which is defined as a contrast in pitch pattern, to create a distinction between words. Burmese is unusual, however, in that its "tone" contrasts involve a poorly-understood combination of pitch and breathy or creaky voice quality. This study investigates the phonetic qualities that are universally available to encode the lexical contrasts of a language, focusing on the problem of tonal contrast in Burmese. The experiments conducted for this study will test which acoustic and articulatory dimensions are most strongly associated with the production of each tone. Twelve Burmese speakers will read a scripted list of contrasting words, once while wearing sensors that measure the opening of the glottis (electroglottography) and a second time wearing an oro-nasal mask that measures airflow from the mouth and nose. Both of these non-invasive techniques offer a way to measure the physiological states responsible for tonal distinctions and therefore provide data that will augment the study's digital analysis of the acoustic waveforms. The study contributes to phonetic research by investigating relationships between the (indirect but easily accessible) acoustic signal and direct articulatory measures of airflow and glottal width. The research is also significant for the theory of tone development (tonogenesis), and language change more generally. Better understanding of the present contrast in Burmese thus has implications for the socio-cultural issues of how and why languages undergo sound change over time and form new language or dialect communities. Finally, a clearer knowledge of how Burmese syllables differ from one another will contribute to our understanding of the dimensions of sound structure that are under the speaker's control. This knowledge can improve language teaching, of Burmese and other tonal languages specifically, and of second and foreign languages in general.