Christian DiCanio

Friday, February 15th at 1:30 p.m., Christian DiCanio will give a colloquium in the UCSD Linguistics Department, in AP&M 4301.

Variation in Trique tone: from coarticulation to modeling

The production of speech involves substantial variation. How a single sound is produced may vary with speech context, speech rate, prosodic context, and with socio-indexical factors across speakers, and a primary aim of phonetic research is to discover and understand the principles governing such variation. In this talk, I address factors which influence variability in tone production using fieldwork data that I have collected on Itunyoso Trique, an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, which has a large inventory of lexical tone contrasts. I examined the influence of tonal context, speech rate, and stress on the production of tone using elicited natural sentences from Trique speakers. While the phonetic realization of tone varies significantly with each of these factors, tones remain distinct within the pitch range. These results have been examined with respect to contrast maintenance in speech production and modeled using tone gestures within the task dynamics and application model (TADA), in order to evaluate different tonal alignment hypotheses.