Chapter 7 Music-to-Language Mapping: Tone and Term
7.2 Some Basics and the Proposed Corresponding Principles
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Chapter 7
Music-to-Language Mapping: Tone and Term Association
7.1 Introduction
This chapter examines children’s perception of the musical melody in the singing of Mandarin songs. I observe how the children map the musical pitches to linguistic tones, and how they associate the tones to the words or phrases in their mental lexicon.
The music-to-language mapping is generalized by the schema in (166).
(166) Music-to-language mapping: tone
Singing words or phrases are mapped to the linguistic input forms with similar tonal values through the perception grammar. The children associate what they have heard to their mental lexicon through the production grammar. In particular, I examine how disyllabic musical pitches (rising, falling, and level) are transformed into linguistic tones, and how the toned disyllabic strings are interpreted and produced in the output.
7.2 Some Basics and the Proposed Corresponding Principles
In Chao’s (1930) five-scale notation system, Mandarin has four lexical tones, as Musical output
Perception grammar Linguistic input
Production grammar
Linguistic output‧ 國
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listed in (167), including 55, which represents high level, 35, which represents rising, 21, which represents low, and 53, which represents falling.
(167) Tone notations: numeric values T1 T2 T3 T4
55 35 21 53
Musical pitches show the highness or lowness of a sound. The database provides a variety of musical pitch combinations. For the convenience of discussion, the pitch names are converted into numeric musical notation. The pitch name of a G major scale is given in (168). For instance, the numeric musical notation for G is 1, and C refers to the middle C on the piano keyboard.
(168) G major scale and numeric musical notation conversion
In this study, I propose a corresponding scale between musical pitch and language tone, as in (169).
(169) Musical pitch to language tone corresponding scale
Pitch name G A B C D E F# G
Number
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Music
Pitch, 1,
#1 2,
#2, 3 4,
#4, 5
#5, 6,
#6 7, 1,
#
Register [-upper] Unspecified [+upper]
Language
Tone 1 2 3 4 5Register [-upper] Unspecified [+upper]
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There are totally fifteen musical pitches in the database. The distance of each pitch is a half step (半音), which is the distance from one key to the next adjacent key on the keyboard. For example, the musical pitches,
,1
, and #1
, correspond to 1 in linguistic tone, the musical pitches,2
, #2
, and3
, correspond to 2 in linguistic tone, and so forth.The music register, as proposed in (169), may affect the tonal perception. Yip (1989, 2007) proposes two binary features, [-upper] and [+upper], to characterize the tonal registers; the tone ranges from 1 to 2 is of the [-upper] register, that from 4 to 5 is of the [+upper] register, whereas 3 is unspecified. The term “register” in fact comes from music. In terms of the pitch-tone correspondence, I propose here that the musical pitch ranges from
to #1
pertains to the [-upper] register, that from4
to #i
pertains to the [+upper] register, but that from2
to3
is unspecified. The [-upper] and [+upper]registers in music correspond to the level tones. The unspecified pitch range can be mapped to either the [+upper] register or the [-upper] register.
The distance between two musical pitches is also a factor that decides the perceived tones. The larger distance between the musical pitches, the larger distance between the perceived tones. The scale in (170) shows the pitch distance that is calculated by the number of half step, namely, 0.5. Two half steps add up to one whole step, which is counted as 1 in distance. For example, the distance from pitch 1 to
5
is 3.5. The distance from a pitch to itself is 0.(170) Distance of musical pitches
Pitch
1
#1 2
#2 3 4
#4 5
#5 6
#6 7 1
#
Distance 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5
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The distance between two language tones is shown in (171). For example, the tonal distance from 1 to 5 is 4. The distance from any tone to itself is 0.
(171) Distance of tones
The correspondence between the musical pitch distance and the tone distance is proposed in (172).
(172) Pitch distance mapping principle
Musical dist. = 0 Tonal dist. = 0 0.5 Musical dist. ≤ 3 Tonal dist. = 2 Musical dist. 3.5 Tonal dist. = 4
The 0 music distance corresponds to 0 tone distance. When the musical pitch distance is equal to or more than 0.5 but less than or equal to 3, the corresponding tone distance is 2. In Mandarin, 11 and 22, whose distance is 1, are usually perceived as low both. However, 11 and 33, whose distance is 2, are not regarded the same. When the musical pitch distance is equal to or more than 3.5, the corresponding tone distance is 4. This is because there is no limit for musical pitch distance, but the tone distance is at most 4 in Mandarin (and other Chinese dialects).
7.3 Data Design
The data are designed to examine two questions of the music-to-language mapping. First, how is musical pitch interpreted as linguistic tone by children? What
Lg tone 1 2 3 4 5
Distance 1 1 1 1
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is the relationship between pitch-tone faithfulness and term association?
The data are collected from normal-hearing preschool children, aged from four to six. The children live in Taipei and their parents are all native Mandarin speakers.
There are totally six children participating in this project. Three of them are female and three are male.5 All of the children can precisely repeat Mandarin tones and musical melodies, which indicates that they can correctly perceive Mandarin tones and musical melodies.
The children are asked to listen to the singing of disyllabic terms. The words that children are familiar to are animals, body parts, food and drink, natural vocabularies, common verbs, etc., mainly taken from Liu & Chen’s (2015) study that evaluates children from sixteen months to thirty-six months. The evaluation inventory of Liu &
Chen (2015) is constructed on the basis of MCDI (Mandarin-Chinese Communicative Development Inventories, Taiwan) proposed by Liu & Tsao (2010). Some examples of the disyllabic terms in the present study are given in in (173).
(173) Examples of the familiar disyllabic words/phrases Familiar words/phrases familiar or unfamiliar with. The words or phrases are set to different combination of musical pitches from (173). Each syllable is set to one musical pitch, whose duration is one beat. The syllables are sung by a female native Mandarin speaker with an
5 In spite of the fact that Lin (1968) finds that there are no significant sex differences in language development of preschool children, both sexes of children are included in this study.
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electric keyboard. The singer is well-trained in music and singing so that the musical pitches are produced accurately. The children are asked to tell the possible lyrics that are sung by the singer. The following are some examples.
(174) Examples of the singing words/phrases
The singing output in (174a) display a falling pitch, whereas that in (174b) shows rising pitch. The pitch contour in (174c) is level.