In this paper I review the methodology that I used in beginning my early fieldwork on a tonal Athabaskan language, including preparation through reading and listening, working with speakers, organizing data, and describing and analyzing the data, stressing how these are not steps or stages, but intersect and interact with each other.

This study investigated the phonological awareness of 219 first, second, and fourth grade Cantonese-speaking children from the south of China, who received immersion Mandarin instruction beginning in the first grade. Children received onset, rime and tone awareness tasks in Cantonese and Mandarin. Children performed better on the Cantonese onset…

Using Mandarin Chinese, a "tone language" in which the pitch contours of syllables differentiate words, the authors examined the acoustic modifications of infant-directed speech (IDS) at the syllable level to test 2 hypotheses: (a) the overall increase in pitch and intonation contour that occurs in IDS at the phrase level would not distort…

The ability of native English (NE) and native Chinese (NC) speakers to identify and discriminate the mid-versus the lowtone contrast in Thai was investigated before and after auditory training. The variables under investigation were first language background and the interstimulus interval (ISI) of the presentation (500 ms vs. 1500 ms). The NC…

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 study examined the tonal patterns in Komo, a sub-Bantu language of about 200,000 speakers in Zaire. It investigated: (1) the minimal lexical specifications necessary for Komo tones; (2) what sort of tonal alternations exist and how they may be accounted for most simply with rules; (3) how tonal phenomena interact with Komo morphology; and (4) at…

The present study investigated 3-year-old children's perception and production of Mandarin lexical tones in monosyllabic words. Thirteen 3-year-old, Mandarin-speaking children participated in the study. Tone perception was examined by a picture-pointing task, and tone production was investigated by picture naming. To compare children's productions…

Tone-based classification rules for Igbo nouns need modification because: (1) class 1 nouns (monosyllables with high tones) do not, as claimed, operate differently from other terminal high-tone nouns; and (2) class 6 nouns (di-syllabic with downstep tones) can be accounted for within class 2 and class 3 nouns known as HH and LH nouns). The proper…

An autosegmental analysis of Kagate tone is presented. The focus is on tonal instability, which occurs as the result of a compensatory lengthening process. To account for facts of tonal stability, previously hypothesized, and tonal instability, it is proposed that the location of tone within the overall geometry is subject to parametric variation,…

One dialect of Yi spoken in Meigu County in the southern part of China's Sichuan Province is analyzed for its tone patterns, based on data provided by a bilingual native speaker. Consonant and vowel inventories are provided. Three contrastive tones are found. One has three allophones, which are conditioned by the preceding tone. Tonal allophony is…

A study of Emai, an Edoid language of south-central Nigeria, focuses on the system of constraints governing tonal processes. Specifically, it examines the ways in which general processes of low tone raising and high tone lowering are realized in domains constructed by verbs and by preverbal auxiliary and adverbial constituents. Sequentially…

A study of the relationships between Chinese dialects based on a quantitative measure of dialect affinity is summarized. First, tone values in all the dialect localities available in the early 1970s were used to calculate the dialectal differences in terms of tone height with respect to the "yin and yang" split. In the late 1970s, calculations of…

This study examines the effectiveness of imagery and electronic visual feedback in facilitating students' acquisition of Japanese pronunciation skills. The independent variables, animated graphic annotation (AGA) and immediate visual feedback (IVF) were integrated into a Japanese computer-assisted language learning (JCALL) program focused on the…

Technological advances have brought about the ever-increasing utilisation of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) media in the learning of a second language (L2). Computer-mediated communication, for example, provides a practical means for extending the learning of spoken language, a challenging process in tonal languages such as Chinese,…

American students are exposed to many different romanization systems when learning Chinese. The most important systems include Pinyin, Zhuyin fuhao, Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzhy, and the Yale system, to name just a few. The Pinyin system, which is built on the English alphabet, is the official transliteration system of mainland China. The Zhuyin…