Tonal Aspects of Language Symposium: Bridging Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Tone

Suny At Buffalo, Amherst NY

Investigators

Abstract

The essential building blocks of spoken human language are the consonants and vowels that we produce and perceive to communicate. Yet, separate from these elements is a melodic level called word prosody. By changing pitch and emphasizing certain parts of a word, we can convey the word's meaning and even the broader significance of a phrase. In approximately 50% of the world's languages, changes in pitch on a single syllable can change a word's meaning. Such languages are called tone languages. The most commonly-spoken language in the world, Chinese, is a tone language, as are most of the languages of East and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southern Mexico. Yet despite decades of research on the building blocks of language, consonants and vowels, we understand little of how humans perceive tone and how tone is integrated into the larger grammatical systems that we use to communicate in everyday life. For instance, Just how is tone processed in the brain? What do speakers produce and listeners tune their ears towards when producing tones rapidly in conversation? How do the deeper grammatical processes affecting tone influence such things? The goal of this project is to bring together experts from diverse perspectives who focus on tone languages. While linguists have explored the diverse ways in which tone interacts with grammar and meaning, they have paid less attention to its role in cognition. On the other hand, psychologists have focused mainly on the neural and behavioral processing of tone, but have not explored tonal detail nor its interaction with grammar. Furthermore, most of the cognitive research on tone focuses on just a handful of East Asian languages. Yet, tonal systems vary substantially across the world's languages and the research should reflect this diversity. Finally, computational work on tone languages has the potential to promote cross-collaboration among researchers, but such work is still in its infancy. The 5th Symposium on the Tonal Aspects of Languages will focus specifically on integrating different academic approaches to the study of tone, promoting the study of diverse tone languages, and modeling tonal behavior using computational methods. These goals will promote greater collaboration across disciplines and drive the scientific study of tone forward.