Tonogenesis: the perception of tone and the role of place of articulation in Kurtöp

Abstract

Previous work on tonogenesis in Kurtöp production [1, 2] has addressed questions of propagation. They describe patterns whereby environments following more sonorous onsets appear to develop tone prior to less sonorous onsets. Additionally, the production study by Plane [2] revealed that place of articulation may also play a role in the order of tonogenetic sound change for production. Perceptual evidence for these processes in Kurtöp has not yet been researched. As such, this paper assesses how the sequence of tone propagation manifests in perception for Kurtöp. A two-way forced choice perceptual identification task was designed to investigate the degree to which fundamental frequency (f 0) has phonologized in Kurtöp perception. It tested the hypothesis that contrastive tone develops following dorsal onsets prior to bilabial-dental onsets. The results of the study show a division between the dorsal and bilabial-dental onset environments, whereby the dorsal onset environments exhibit more advanced phonologization of f 0 than the bilabial-dentals, which corroborate the findings from previous studies.