The Language-specific Use of Fundamental Frequency Rise in Segmentation of an Artificial Language: Evidence from Listeners of Taiwanese Southern Min

Abstract

Experience with native-language prosody encourages language-specific strategies for speech segmentation. Conflicting findings from previous research suggest that these strategies may not be abstracted away from the acoustic manifestation of prosodic features in the native speech. Using the artificial language learning paradigm, the current study explores this possibility in connection with listeners of a lexical tone language called Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). In TSM, the only rising lexical tone occurs almost only on the final syllable of the language’s tone sandhi domain and is phonetically associated with final lengthening. Based on these observations, Experiment I examined what constituted a sufficient finality cue for use by TSM listeners to support segmentation: (a) final fundamental frequency (F0) rise only; or (b) final F0 rise conjoined with final lengthening. The results showed that segmentation was inhibited by the former cue but facilitated by the latter. Experiment II showed that the facilitation cannot be attributed entirely to final lengthening, as a null effect was found when final lengthening was the sole prosodic cue to segmentation. It is thus assumed that acoustic details as fine-grained as the lengthening of the rising tone are involved in the modulation of the segmentation strategy whereby TSM listeners perceive F0 rise as signaling finality. The inhibitory effect of final F0 rise alone found in Experiment I motivated Experiment III, which revealed that initial F0 rise in the absence of lengthening cues improved TSM listeners’ segmentation. It is speculated that such use of initial F0 rise might reflect a cross-linguistic segmentation solution.