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The perception of lexical tone in Mambila.

The issue of the perception of lexical tone has been addressed mainly through studies of Southeast Asian languages which feature phonological contour tones as well as level tones. Little attention has been paid to African languages which have, almost exclusively, only level tones. This paper examine...

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Published in:Language & Speech Vol. 43; no. 2; pp. 163 - 183
Main Author: Connell B
Format: research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Sage Publications Inc. Apr-Jun2000
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Apr-Jun2000
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        atl: The perception of lexical tone in Mambila.
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        au: Connell B
        affil: Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE, UK. E-mail: connellb@ermine.ox.ac.uk
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          Accents and Dialects Africa, Western
          Pitch Perception
          Speech Acoustics
          Africa, Western
          Comparative Studies
          Funding Source
          Human
          Hypothesis
          Male
          Significance Test
          Speech Perception
          Male
      ab: The issue of the perception of lexical tone has been addressed mainly through studies of Southeast Asian languages which feature phonological contour tones as well as level tones. Little attention has been paid to African languages which have, almost exclusively, only level tones. This paper examines tone perception in Mambila, a Benue-Congo language with four level lexical tones. A categorization experiment was run to determine some of the salient aspects of the perceptual nature of these tones. Since the four tones are well defined with respect to production, we sought to determine whether this characteristic carried over into perception, the expectation being that experimental stimuli, on the basis of pitch height alone, would fall into four reasonably well defined categories. Results showed interesting differences across the four tones, with indications that the two Mid tones, T2 and T3, are perceptually different than the High (T1) and Low (T4) tones. The experiment was run a second time, using a group of native English listeners, to assess to what extent results for the Mambila listeners were determined by the perceptual structure of the Mambila tone system. A Signal Detection analysis was used, which revealed important differences between the two groups of listeners. Results are discussed in light of what is known about universal tendencies of tone systems and the historical development of the Mambila system.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
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        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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