--動口不動手-- 以運動控制觀點檢視 華語聲調特性及不同組合中聲調的改變

Abstract

華語是一種有聲調的語言，不同聲調在音高、音長…等皆有獨特性，會因不同情境而改變。以往對於華語聲調都僅止於在語音聲學的研究，較少有以說話動作型態作為了解聲調特性的方法。本研究以運動控制的觀點檢視華語的聲調表現，以動力系統理論的方法來解釋不同聲調在不同情境下的動作型態。8名華語(台灣地區)為母語的成年人，以不同速度類說話的方式，說雙字詞句子(工作一)與非雙字詞句子(工作二)，並擷取下唇垂直方向的開、闔口位移與時間進行資料分析，以二因子重複量數變異數分析檢驗四種聲調在開闔口與聲調間的關係。結果顯示四種聲調沒有差別，但聲調在開闔口表現上有差異，聲調會因為不同的說話情境而改變動作型態。華語聲調確實會因為在句中有不同的角色，而有不同的動作型態。

The tones in spoken Mandarin provide an extra element to distinguish words in addition to the syllables. Speech production involves a major part of controlling the motor system to perform the appropriate tone-syllable combinations. However, there has been little research on the Mandarin tone variations from the motor control perspective. The purpose of the study was to examine the kinematic characteristics of different tones under different situations. Eight Taiwanese male Mandarin native speakers participated in the experiment. The first task was to perform the disyllabic words with all 16 possible bi-tonal combinations of the four lexical tones of Mandarin. One of the 16 possible bi-tonal combinations of the 4 tones was used and repeated for 5 times to construct the meaningful sentence. Another task was to perform 4meaningful sentences constructed with words of irregular number of syllables. The kinematics data of the lower lip movement were captured and digitized for analyses. The amplitude and the duration of the opening and closing gestures were examined using 2 way repeated measures ANOVA.The results show that the four tones of Taiwanese Mandarin do not behaved differently in spoken sentences. However, they do have different performance on opening and closing gestures. The context dependent tonal characteristics were observed in the motor performance of the spoken disyllabic words. Using the speech-like task to investigate the feature of language provides further understanding of the influence of the tonal contexts in Mandarin speech production.