This study intends to better understand the sound system of Southern Yi through building a speech corpus. Southern Yi is a minority language spoken in Yunnan, China, and it belongs to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. So far, all studies on Southern Yi have focused on monosyllables elicited either in isolation or in a frame sentence. The goal of this study is to investigate how the sound system is realized in continuous speech. Fieldwork on Southern Yi will be carried out in Yunnan, China, and speakers from different age groups will be recruited to participate in recording a speech corpus. The speech corpus will subsequently be analyzed to evaluate how individual speakers differ in their articulation and whether there are consistent age differences between the speakers. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Professor Yan Lu of the Department of Ethnic Languages and Literature at Yunnan Nationalities University.
The aim of building a speech corpus of Southern Yi is to study an ongoing sound change in continuous speech. Southern Yi has a register contrast in its vowels, typically referred to as the tense vs. lax contrast. The role of phonation in the register contrast has been well established. Additionally, Southern Yi exhibits differences in F1, F2, and F0 between the two registers. The register contrast is in the process of shifting from using phonation as the primary cue to using formants as the primary cues. A corpus of spoken Southern Yi containing both reading style speech and spontaneous speech will be recorded in Yunnan, China. Both audio and electroglottograph (EGG) signals will be recorded. The corpus will be segmented and annotated at the sentence, word, and phoneme levels. The resulting corpus will be used 1) to study how the register contrast is realized in continuous speech within an individual speaker and across different speakers, and 2) to better understand how the ongoing sound change is reflected in the production from different age groups in the community.
This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.
