Sentence examples for tone category from inspiring English sources

For each same trial, different tokens of the same syllable were used, so that the task involved a tone category match rather than an exact acoustic match.

Overall, Mandarin participants appeared to find the category assimilation task easier than did Cantonese participants (in terms of having a higher number of categorizations; i.e., tones were heard as a single native tone category), particularly for Thai level tones.

We note that Mandarin participants had fewer native response categories (four vs. six) to choose from; given that the Cantonese tone space is more crowded, fine phonetic detail (e.g., the vocal quality/creak associated with the Cantonese low-falling [21] tone; Vance, 1977; Yu & Lam, 2011) may be more important for Cantonese perceivers when determining native tone category membership.

It can be seen that even for the Thai group (who were not cross-mapping), the response percentages for any one tone category in VO conditions were relatively low (all well below 50%%), and discrimination was not in fact significantly different from chance (dˈ =0) for any one tone pairing.

Firstly here, in order to investigate the tone category assimilation issue, Cantonese and Mandarin speakers were asked to map Thai tones onto their own native lexical tone categories, and English speakers were asked to do the same, but with native intonation (prosodic) categories.

A full account of tone assimilation will likely need to incorporate considerations of phonetic, and even acoustic, similarity and overlap between nonnative and native tone categories.

Even within tone categories, the predominant assimilation patterns for the Mandarin and Cantonese groups were identical across the AV and AO conditions (see the Appendix).

The presence of both visual and auditory information did not appear to affect the relative classifications between the level baseline and other tone categories.

Mandarin and Cantonese (tone-language) speakers were asked to categorize Thai tones according to their own native tone categories, and Australian English (non-tone-language) speakers to categorize Thai tones into their native intonation categories for instance, question or statement.

Alternatively, there is evidence that tones could be assimilated to specific intonation (prosodic) categories in nontone languages (So & Best 2008, 2011, 2014), although it is quite possible that native intonation categories might not have the same degree of influence as native tone categories (Hallé et al., 2004).

UPDATE: Reebok has responded to the controversy and maintained its stance on the shoes, telling us: "We stand behind our EasyTone technology – the first shoe in the toning category that was inspired by balance-ball training.