Doctoral Dissertation Research: Articulatory and Corpus Study of Relative Timing among Consonants, Vowels, and Tones

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

A core topic of study in linguistics is the tacit knowledge that speakers have about their language. For all spoken languages, part of this knowledge includes how the speech organs, including the lips, tongue, and velum, are coordinated in time to produce speech. Additionally, many languages also distinguish words from each other using different pitch patterns, called tones. This project investigates whether tones interact with the coordination of other speech organs, drawing together several types of data from the understudied Tibetan language. Methodologically, the project integrates experimental measurements on the physical movement of articulators with audio data gathered in Nepal, harnessing the variation found between speakers in the diaspora Tibetan community to understand basic principles of how tones, consonants and vowels are coordinated in time. Broader impacts include the publicly available deposit of audio recordings to enable future work by linguists and community members, capturing a snapshot of a language undergoing rapid change. The Co-PI, a doctoral student at Yale University, will analyze acoustic and articulatory data of Tibetan as spoken in its diaspora, an understudied language with significant variation between speakers. One aspect of the variation is that some speakers have retained tone while others speakers have lost tone contrasts. The main hypothesis is that the presence of lexical tone alters the coordination of articulatory gestures, with articulatory and acoustic consequences resulting from the balance of competing demands of laryngeal and supralaryngeal aspects of speech production. This study extends analysis of acoustic data collected by the co-PI in Nepal to a corpus of spontaneous speech. The corpus analysis is crucially informed by an experiment on the articulatory kinematics of Tibetan. The experiment uses electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to track the movement of the tongue and lips together with acoustic recordings. Besides providing a test of the main hypothesis in laboratory speech, analysis of co-registered acoustic and kinematic signals will establish acoustic measures of relative timing that can be used in the corpus analysis. The corpus study will evaluate hypotheses in naturalistic speech data, allow consideration of a wider range of factors influencing timing, further assess variability within and across speakers, and provide a valuable resource for future research. This project will contribute to scientific understanding of the mental representation of tone and the timing relations among oral, laryngeal, and tonal gestures, combine corpus and articulatory methods, draw evidence from variation, and advance research on a less-studied language. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.