The roles of pitch and phonation in Vietnamese and Mandarin

Abstract

(200 words) Pitch and phonation may be used individually or together in languages: some languages do not make systematic use of either property, others use one or the other, and others a combination, where different relationships may hold. We investigate this last option in Mandarin and Vietnamese using substantial, systematically collected corpora, first with auditory and visual (spectrogram) assessment of the presence of Creaky Phonation (CP), then with acoustic and statistical (Binary Logistic Regression) Analyses. We focus on the s ắ c and ngã tones in Vietnamese, claimed to contrast in CP not F0, and all four tones of Mandarin, where CP often arises with Tone 3 (dipping), and possibly others. We propose that despite differences in the distribution of F0 and CP, both languages crucially require underlying tonal contrasts, but differ in the source and role of CP. In Mandarin, CP correlates with low F0, as a type of “artifact”, resulting in gender differences. In Vietnamese, CP cannot be due to F0, as it appears with high tones; instead, it is an additional “gesture” speakers may introduce along with F0 in producing the ngã tone, but need not, as seen in the emergence of two speaker groups based on their use of CP. studies show that in Vietnamese, CP (not F0) is the crucial contrastive cue for the s ắ c vs. ngã tones, but in Mandarin that CP enhances perception of T3, while F0 remains the main cue. Our investigation shows that, despite differences, in production, Vietnamese and Mandarin rely on F0 to make the tonal contrasts. The fundamental difference is that in Mandarin, CP is essentially an “artifact” of the low F0, and thus occurs in more cases with Males than Females, while in Vietnamese, CP occurs with high F0 values, and thus is an additional “gesture” that may, but need not, be used to enhance the ngã tone, hence the two speaker groups.