The term "Mien" is used to describe several mountain peoples of Southeast Asia, who migrated from China in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their strong family structure serves their agricultural way of life. The language, though tonal, exhibits many similarities to English. Religious beliefs are animistic, centering around spirits of…

The morphotonemics of Ganda have been particularly troublesome to linguists trying to describe the tonal structure of Bantu languages. Ganda has three surface tones, and changes in the surface tones parallel changes in grammatical function only part of the time. The author has found that a description of Ganda tones becomes manageable if instead…

The prosodic features of maternal speech to infants were measured quantitatively in a tonal language, Mandarin Chinese, to determine whether the features were similar to those observed in nontonal languages such as English and German. The pattern of results for Mandarin motherese was similar to that reported for other languages. (PCB)

Attempts to determine (1) the number and nature of perceptual dimensions of tone in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Taiwanese listeners; (2) to what extent individual differences in tone perception are influenced by a Chinese listener's language background, and (3) whether differences in perceptual saliency of dimensions across Chinese languages can be…

Proposes to demonstrate that the Qieyun language, long used as the basis for Chinese dialectal comparison, is an inadequate basis for explaining the tonal evolution of some of the Min dialects; research supported by the U.S. Office of Education and the Chinese Linguistics Project at Princeton University. (RS)

The traditional division of the Chinese syllable into initial, final, and tone is examined. Distributional criteria are used to justify this analysis as more applicable to the Cantonese syllable than strict segmental analysis. A detailed analysis of the Cantonese final is given and implications for cross-language analyses are discussed. (CHK)

Investigated a new research design for the collection of reliable tone perception data from found children, compared lexical and nonlexical items for testing tone perception ability, and identified the relative ease of perceiving the three basic tone contrasts in Cantonese--high level/high rising, high level/low falling, and high rising/low…

In tone languages, the identity of a word depends on its tone pattern as well as its phonetic structure. The primary cue to tone identity is the fundamental frequency (F0) contour. Two experiments explore how listeners perceive Mandarin monosyllables in which all or part of the F0 information has been neutralized. In Experiment 1, supposedly…

A phonetic study of vowel devoicing in the Shanghai dialect of Chinese explored the phonetic conditions under which the high, closed vowels and the apical vowel in Shanghai are most likely to become devoiced. The phonetic conditions may be segmental or suprasegmental. Segmentally, the study sought to determine whether a certain type of pre-vocalic…

The sentence intonation of Panjabi (a tone language) is described, as it is spoken in the district of Sialkot in West Pakistan. A system of phonetic transcription is established, and the intonation of sentences and questions is treated in two chapters. (JB)

This treatment of Thai phonology for beginning students begins with a simplified presentation of tones, consonants, and vowels. The descriptions use a minimum of linguistic terminology and the Thai examples appear in phonemic transcription. Following the introductory section on phonology are 18 pronunciation exercises which drill the tones and…

This fourth and final part of a report on the Tibeto-burman languages of Nepal presents text material on Chepang, by Ross and Kathleen Caughley; on Newari, by Austin and Margrit Hale; on Sunwar, by Dora Bieri and Marlene Schulze; and on Sherpa, by Kent and Sandra Gordon. For the first three parts of this report, see AL 002 731-3. [Not available in…

In Cantonese, there are cases where two semantically related monosyllabic morphemes contrast with each other by tone only. Such cases may be classified into four groups. Synchronic classification of examples may be of some pedagogical use to teachers and students of Cantonese. (CHK)

Revised version of a paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Western Conference on Linguistics, Vancouver, October 22, 1971. (VM)

Paper based on data gathered on the Crow reservation during a total residence of 32 months from 1967 - 1970 under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. (VM)