Volume 64, Issue 1

The present study reports electropalatographic and acoustic data on the positionaland contextual characteristics of alveolar taps and trills in Majorcan,Valencian and Eastern Catalan. The two consonant classes are invariably opposedby degree of tongue dorsum contact and F2, but only differentiated by place ofarticulation when constriction location for the trill is sufficiently retracted. Trillsare produced with less than three contacts and may exhibit a single contact inutterance-initial position and, less often, in /Cr, VrV/ sequences. Word-final and, toa lesser extent, preconsonantal rhotics are implemented as taps in Majorcan andValencian, and strengthened into trills in Eastern Catalan. Moreover, thereappears to be an inverse relationship between initial strengthening, and intervocalicweakening and the absence of syllable-final strengthening, for Valencianrhotics, which could be indicative of a pattern of intersegmental organization.Shortening and articulatory reduction turned out not to be necessarily related forextremely short Valencian taps, which undergo much undershoot intervocalicallybut are highly constricted in /Cɾ , rC/ sequences. Other research aspects suchas devoicing and intergestural timing for Catalan alveolar rhotics are alsoinvestigated.

As one of the major Chinese dialects, Cantonese has a tone system consistingof nine lexical tones and three additional changed tones, which is considerablymore complex than that of Mandarin. The most important acoustic feature characterizingthese tones is the contour of the voice fundamental frequency (the F₀ contour).In this article we present an approach to modeling F₀ contours of Cantoneseutterances, based on an extension of the command-response model. Analysis-bysynthesisof F₀ contours of the utterances with a fixed carrier frame, in which a targetsyllable with each tone type is embedded, shows that each tone type can berepresented by a specific pattern (polarity, timing, and amplitude) of tone commands.These patterns are found to be essentially maintained in F₀ contours of theutterances with unconstrained text. With the definition of these tone commandpatterns, the command-response model not only provides a novel phonologicaldescription of tones, but also gives high accuracy of approximations to F₀ contoursof Cantonese utterances and allows one to analyze various tonal phenomenain quantitative terms. Quantitative distinctions between various tones are thenrevealed by statistical analysis of the timing and amplitude of tone commands.Especially, systematic alignment in timing is found between the onsets/offsets oftone commands and the rhyme of a syllable, and hence a set of constraints can beintroduced, which together with those on tone command amplitudes and phrasecommand parameters, is then applied for generating F₀ contours of Cantoneseutterances. The validity of the approach is verified by perceptual evaluation of thesynthetic speech stimuli with model-generated F₀ contours, both on the intelligibilityof tones and on the naturalness of prosody.