Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T06:07:37.409Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Development of Lexical Pitch Accent Systems: An Autosegmental Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Mitsuhiko Ota*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh

Abstract

This article presents an autosegmental analysis of the development of pitch phonology in Swedish and Japanese, which mark both lexical accent and phrasing through movements in fundamental frequency (F0). Predictions that follow from the autosegmental model are tested against spontaneous production data from child Japanese. In support of the analysis that lexical pitch accent and phrasal intonation are acquired as separate sequences of tonal features, the falling and rising slopes of F0 contours are shown to develop independently. The late emergence of the phrase-initial rise is attributable to the allophonic surface realisation of the low boundary tone. Moreover, developments in contour shapes are characterised by demarcated emergence of F0 turning points that are aligned with specific segments, providing further support for the view that pitch phonology is acquired as strings of tonal units associated with segments and prosodic constituents.

Résumé

Résumé

Cet article présente une analyse autosegmentale du développement des systèmes tonaux du suédois et du japonais, deux langues qui marquent l’accent lexical et phrastique par un mouvement dans la fréquence fondamentale (F0). Les prédictions découlant du modèle autosegmental sont testées à l’aide de données du japonais produites spontanément par un enfant. L’analyse, qui pose que la hauteur tonale de l’accent lexical et l’intonation phrastique s’acquièrent comme des séquences de traits tonaux distinctes, est soutenue par le développement indépendant des montées et descentes des contours de la F0. L’émergence tardive de la montée en début de syntagme est attribuable à la réalisation allophonique de surface du ton de frontière bas. De plus, les développements dans les formes du contour sont caractérisés par l’émergence marquée de points tournants de la F0 alignés sur des segments spécifiques. Ceci appuie l’idée que le système de hauteur tonale s’acquiert comme des chaînes d’unités tonales associées à des segments et des constituants prosodiques.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andersson, Lennart. 1990. Ett barns väg till accent I. Göteborg: University of Göteborg.Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary. 1986. Stress and non-stress accent. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, Mary, and Pierrehumbert, Janet. 1986. Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3:255310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul. 1993. Accurate short-term analysis of the fundamental frequency and the harmonics-to-noise ratio of a sampled sound. Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences 17:97110.Google Scholar
Bruce, Gosta. 1977. Swedish word accents in sentence perspective. Lund: Gleerup.Google Scholar
Clumeck, Harold. 1980. The acquisition of tone. In Child phonology 1, ed. Yeni-Komshian, Grace, Kavanaugh, James, and Ferguson, Charles A., 257275. New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crystal, David. 1986. Prosodic development. In Language acquisition: Studies in first language development, ed. Fletcher, Paul and Garman, Mike, 174197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte, and Vihman, Marilyn M.. 1991. Adaptation to language: Evidence from babbling and early words in four languages. Language 61:297319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte, Sagart, Laurent, and Durand, Catherine. 1984. Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language. Journal of Child Language 16:117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, Katherine. 1992. The acquisition of Sesotho. In The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition 3, ed. Slobin, Dan I., 557638. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine. 1993. Issues in the acquisition of the Sesotho tonal system. Journal of Child Language 20:275301.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Demuth, Katherine. 1995. The acquisition of tonal systems. In Phonological acquisition and phonological theory, ed. Archibald, John, 111134.Google Scholar
Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Donahue, Mark. 1997. Tone systems in New Guinea. Linguistic Typology 1:347386.Google Scholar
Engstrand, Olle, Williams, Karen, and Strömqvist, Sven. 1991. Acquisition of the Swedish tonal word accent contrast. Actes du Congrès International de Sciences Phonétiques 7:324327.Google Scholar
Fujisaki, Hiroya. 1983. Dynamic characteristics of voice fundamental frequency in speech and singing. In The pronunciation of speech, ed. MacNeilage, Peter F., 3955. Heidelberg: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furrow, David. 1984. Young children’s use of prosody. Journal of Child Language 11:203213.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gårding, Eva. 1983. A generative model of intonation. In Prosody: Model and measurements, ed. Cutler, Anne and Robert Ladd, D., 1125. Heidelberg: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gårding, Eva. 1987. Speech act and tonal pattern in standard Chinese: Constancy and variation. Phonetica 44:1329.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldsmith, John. 1976. Autosegmental phonology. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Hallé, Pierre, de Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte, and Vihman, Marilyn M.. 1991. Beginnings of prosodic organization: Intonation and duration patterns of disyllables produced by French and Japanese infants. Language and Speech 34:299318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M.A.K. 1979. One child’s protolanguage. In Before speech: The beginning of interpersonal communication, ed. Bullowa, Margaret, 171190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon, and Zee, Draga. 1988. Serbo-Croatian pitch accent. Language 64:227248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 1983. Phonological features of intonational peaks. Language 59: 721759.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 1988. Declination ‘reset’ and the hierarchical organization of utterances. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 84:530544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 1996. Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leben, William. 1973. Suprasegmental phonology. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Ota, Mitsuhiko. 1999. Phonological theory and the development of prosodic structure: Evidence from child Japanese. Doctoral dissertation, Georgetown University.Google Scholar
Ota, Mitsuhiko. 2003. The development of prosodic structure in early words: Continuity, divergence and change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, Ann. M., and Stromqvist, Sven. 1996. The role of prosody in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. In Signals to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, ed. Morgan, James L. and Demuth, Katherine, 215232. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 1980. The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B., and Beckman, Mary E.. 1988. Japanese tone structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Plunkett, Kim, and Stromqvist, Sven. 1992. The acquisition of Scandinavian languages. In The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition 3, ed. Slobin, Dan I., 457556. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Poser, William. 1984. The phonetics and phonology of tone and intonation in Japanese. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Schmid, Beata. 1986. A comparative study of children’s and adults’ acquisition of tone accents in Swedish. Language Learning 36:185210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snow, David. 1998. Children’s imitations of intonation contours: Are rising tones more difficult than falling tones? Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 41:576587.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vihman, Marilyn. 1996. Phonological development. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar