2016 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
An Acoustic Typology of Creaky Voice
| Project/Area Number |
15K16745
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| Research Institution | The University of Aizu |
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Principal Investigator |
Perkins Jeremy 会津大学, コンピュータ理工学部, 准教授 (30725635)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
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| Keywords | phonation / tone / Zhuang / creakiness |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
In FY 2016, we completed analysis of our Zhuang data with the help of hired research assistants.
Preliminary findings were presented and published at the 5th Int'l Symposium of Tonal Aspects of Language (May, 2016) and at the 22nd Himalayan Languages Symposium (Jun, 2016).
Collaboration with J. Villegas on the use of psychoacoustic roughness to detect creaky phonation was presented and published at the 5th Joint Meeting of the ASA & ASJ in Dec. 2016. In Mar. 2017, we submitted a journal article based on this work to the Journal of the ASA.
In Nov. 2016, my collaborator, Seunghun Lee, collected data in Myanmar as part of a joint production study on Burmese tone. This study will form a baseline for our analysis of psychoacoustic roughness as an indicator of creaky phonation in Zhuang.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
Our plan to run a perception experiment on how listeners perceive creakiness did not happen in FY 2016. This happened for two reasons. First, the analysis stage of our production experiment took longer than expected and be. In collecting our Zhuang data, we met a number of challenges in the analysis stage. The primary reason for these challenges came because Zhuang speakers are only literate in Chinese, which meant we were forced to use Chinese characters to elicit the recorded data. As such, the speakers often gave us spoken versions that we didn't expect for a given stimulus. This kind of issue was deliberated on with my co-authors and we devised a new method to handle these data. This new methodology is currently being written up in an extra article for submission to a journal in mid May 2017. So while, the perception experiment is being delayed, this is offset by work done in FY 2016 that will lead an extra journal article submission that was not originally expected.
Second, my collaborator, Dr. Seunghun Lee was traveling to Myanmar to conduct field work on Burmese and so it was decided to prioritize the construction of a similar production study on Burmese to mirror our Zhuang study. This prioritization was justified since Dr. Lee was already traveling to Myanmar for another research project of his, and so this unusual opportunity for Burmese data was expedited at the expense of a perception experiment.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Two journal articles will be submitted in FY2017 to major international journals. The first is a methodology paper based on a new method we used in the analysis of our Zhuang language data; this is being submitted in mid May 2017. The second article will publish the results of our study, detailing the tone system of two dialects of Zhuang and giving a demonstration of how psychoacoustic roughness was used to indicate a phonation contrast in Du'an Zhuang not previously noticed before. I have begun writing both articles, with a complete draft of the first finished already.
Processing and analysis of a parallel study on Burmese will be conducted in FY2017. Research assistants are currently being hired and will be trained to process the data. The results will then be presented in late FY2017, with a journal article publication to follow.
A perception experiment will be conducted to test how Zhuang listeners perceive creaky phonation and non-creaky phonation, using the spoken data as stimuli. The stimuli will be chosen with different levels of creaky phonation (based on our psychoacoustic roughness results), with pitch manipulated so that listeners are confronted with a choice to use pitch or creakiness to classify a given tone. This experiment will be done online, without any need to travel to China to find speakers; we will use our established connections from our previous visit to Guangxi University.
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Research Products
(3 results)
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[Presentation] The roles of phonation and F0 in Zhuang2016
Author(s)
Seunghun Lee, Jeremy Perkins, Julian Villegas
Organizer
2016 Annual Summer Conference of the Linguistic Society of Korea: Its 60th Anniversary Meeting
Place of Presentation
Seoul National University
Year and Date
2016-06-17 – 2016-06-17
