Volume 33, Issue 5

Each word in Diuxi Mixtec has a stressed syllable which is marked by a long vowel. In addition to this stress, some words have a second stress. This second stress occurs only on the last syllable of the word and is marked by intensity and by allotones of both high and low tone. There is a contrast of high versus low tone, and there are allotones which occur in relation to the presence versus absence of word-final stress.

The author examined electromyographic tracings from four muscles – genioglossus (GG), anterior belly of the digastric (D) sternothyroid (ST) and thyrohyoid (TH) – for 210 Twi syllables selected so as to give information on seven parameters: tense/lax vowels, long/short vowels, close/open vowels, front/back vowels, high-tone/low-tone vowels, vowels preceded by a fricative/plosive consonant and vowels preceded by a voiced/voiceless consonant, and concluded, inter alia (1) that GG and D functioned as pitch control muscles but that it is not clear why raising of the larynx should accompany an increase in pitch; (2) that GG did not play the major role in tongue root fronting that was expected of it but that we may have to consider GG to consist of at least four functional muscles; (3) that GG and D offered little evidence to support a prosodic view of vowel harmony in Twi, and (4) that features may be ranked by the muscle activity associated with them and that ‘high-tone’, ‘fricative’ and ‘voiced’ dominated for GG, D and ST.

This study investigated the acoustic correlates of the four Mandarin tones in isolated words and variations in these parameters in relation to sentence environment, syllable vowel, and preceding consonant. Results indicate that differences associated with sentence environment, syllable vowel and preceding consonant affect the realization of the tone, although the four tones maintain their characteristic basic differences. The influence of sentence environment on tones is greater than that of the syllable vowel, and the influence of syllable vowel is greater than that of the preceding consonant.

It is generally believed that all languages, no matter how tonal, have grammatical intonation of some kind. A fall in pitch at the end of ordinary declarative sentences is thought to be universal. Hong Kong Cantonese has six contrastive tones, two rising and four level, according to the impressionistic account given here. The experimental results presented here indicate that sentence-final tone lowering does occur in Cantonese while contrastive stress apparently does not have a significant effect on pitch. In addition, it appears that although intelligibility is somewhat worse sentence-finally than sentence-medially, the tonal distinctions are not neutralized in final position.