The Importance of Duration in Contour Tone Bearing

The Importance of Duration in Contour Tone Bearing

Having high sonority is not the only necessary phonetic dimension for a segment to carry a tone. Tone bearing ability, especially contour tone bearing ability, is also crucially dependent on duration. This is determined by both the production and the perception of contour tones.

Articulatorily, a contour tone requires the implementation of a pitch change, and pitch changes are achieved by changes in the vocal fold tension, which in turn involve the contraction and relaxation of laryngeal muscles—pitch rises are achieved by the contraction of cricothyroid muscles, and pitch falls by the relaxation of cricothyroid muscles and the contraction of thyroarytenoid and sternohyoid muscles (Arnold 1961, Hirano et al. 1969, Lindqvist 1972, Ohala 1978). Therefore, a complicated tonal contour which involves more pitch targets would involve more complicated muscle state change, and thus prefer a longer duration to facilitate implementation. A tonal contour with farther-apart pitch targets would require the muscles to contract or relax to a greater degree, and thus also prefer a greater duration of its carrier (Sundberg 1973, 1979).³ Moreover, Sundberg (1973, 1979) documents that it takes longer to implement a pitch rise than a pitch fall with the same pitch excursion and entertains various articulatory accounts for this finding.⁴ Auditorily, the perceived tonal contour depends on the duration of the tone carrier. Black (1970) and Greenberg and Zee (1979) document that given the same distance of pitch movement, the longer the duration of the vowel, the more ‘contour-like’ the tone is perceived by the listener. Thus a longer duration enhances the perception of a tonal contour with more inflections or a greater pitch distance.

Therefore, three inferences can be drawn regarding the correlation between duration and contour-bearing ability, as summarized in (0). The symbol ‘>’ represents ‘requires a longer duration than’.

a. The greater the number of pitch targets of a tone, the longer duration it requires.

3. The Irrelevance of Onsets to Contour Tone Bearing

Lastly, it must be acknowledged that there is no correlation between syllable onset duration and tone-bearing ability, even when the onset is a sonorant.⁵ Kratochvil (1970) points out that syllable onsets in Mandarin show erratic pitch patterns. Howie (1970, 1974) shows that the pitch carried by sonorant onsets is simply the transition between the tone of the preceding syllable and the tone carried by the rime of the current syllable, and his results are replicated by a series of studies by Xu (1994, 1997, 1998, 1999). The reason for this is probably perceptual. House (1990), through a series of psychoacoustic experiments, shows that rapid spectral changes, especially rapid increases in spectral energy, significantly decrease the hearer’s sensitivity to pitch movement. Therefore, the hearer is less sensitive to pitch information during the transition from the onset consonant to the vowel. Moreover, studies have shown that coda sonorants often have vowel-like qualities; therefore, the transition between a vowel and a coda sonorant is smoother. For example, coda laterals often vocalize, as in English (Lehiste 1964, Bladon and Al-Bamerni 1976, Sproat and Fujimura 1993), Polish (Teslar and Teslar 1962, Stieber 1973, Rubach 1984), Catalan (Recasens et al. 1995, Recasens 1996), and Portuguese (Hall 1943, Feldman 1967, 1972). Coda nasals are sometimes realized as nasal glides, as in Mandarin Chinese (Wang 1997). Bladon (1986) explains this as follows: since vowel-to-sonorant transitions predominantly consist of spectral offsets, and spectral offsets are perceptually less salient than spectral onsets, vowel-to-sonorant transitions are more vulnerable to assimilation than sonorant-to-vowel transitions. Consequently, this does not only give an extra boost in sonority for the coda sonorant to enhance its tone-bearing ability, it also determines that the spectral change between a vowel and a following sonorant is less drastic, which means that the hearer’s sensitivity to pitch during this transition is less affected than during the transition between an onset sonorant and the vowel. A possible consequence of these perceptual effects on the linguistic system is that, during the transition between the onset and the vowel, which is a location where the hearer’s sensitivity to pitch movement is limited, no significant pitch information is encoded.

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