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1. Luyia Tone Melodies

   Ebarb, Kristopher J.; Green, Christopher R.; Marlo, Michael R. (January 2014, Africana Linguistica)

   This paper offers an overview of verbal tone melodies within Luyia, a cluster of Bantu languages spoken in Kenya and Uganda. Luyia tone is diverse, possessing three types of verbal tonal systems: 'conservative', 'predictable', and 'reversive'. We illustrate the general tonal characteristics of each type of system with an exemplar language variety, describing the complex interactions of lexical and melodic tones. 

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2. Artistic adaptation of Seenku tone: Musical surrogates vs. vocal music

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5578834  

   McPherson, Laura; James, Lucas (January 2021, Contemporary African linguistics)

   Akinlabi, Akinbiyi; Bickmore, Lee; Cahill, Michael; Diercks, Michael; Downing, Laura J.; Essegbey, James; Franich, Katie; McPherson, Laura; Rose, Sharon (Ed.)

   The tonal nature of many African languages has long raised questions about mu- sical expression and the relationship between language and music. The two main areas of inquiry have been the relationship between tone and melody in vocal mu- sic (tonal textsetting) and the role of tone in musical surrogate languages (e.g. talk- ing drums). However, the degree of similarity between these two genres in terms of tonal adaptation has remained an open question. In this paper, we present a case study comparing the role of tone in two musical traditions from the Sambla ethnic group of Burkina Faso: vocal music and a balafon (xylophone) surrogate lan- guage. We show that the two have different systems of tone-note correspondence and level of phonological encoding, indicating that musical adaptation of tone is not monolithic. We suggest that these different systems of tonal adaptation may stem from functional, structural, and cultural differences between the two musical genres. 

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3. Heritage Tone and Effects of the Obligatory Contour Principle

   https://doi.org/10.1163/15507076-bja10051  

   Blum, Mirella L (November 2025, Heritage Language Journal)

   Abstract This paper reports on a case study of differences in contextual tonal processes between a mother (native speaker) and adult son (heritage speaker) who speak the Ngok dialect of Dinka. Dinka (Nilotic, South Sudan) is known for its highly complex suprasegmental system. Tone has a high functional load in the language, and one of the primary ways in which varieties of Dinka are differentiated is via the tone systems. I show that lexical tone appears to be less robust for the son, and that when prompted to speak before his parent, the son exhibits less tone sandhi relative to when the parent speaks first. This has implications for underlying specification and subsequent formal analyses and suggests that lexical specification and contextual tonal processes may be processed on different levels. However, inconsistencies in the son’s speech suggest that the overall picture may be more complex than initially anticipated. 

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4. Advanced Second Language Learners of Mandarin Show Persistent Deficits for Lexical Tone Encoding in Picture-to-Word Form Matching

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.689423  

   Pelzl, Eric; Lau, Ellen; Guo, Taomei; DeKeyser, Robert (June 2021, Frontiers in communication)

   null (Ed.)

   People who grow up speaking a language without lexical tones typically find it difficult to master tonal languages after childhood. Accumulating research suggests that much of the challenge for these second language (L2) speakers has to do not with identification of the tones themselves, but with the bindings between tones and lexical units. The question that remains open is how much of these lexical binding problems are problems of encoding (incomplete knowledge of the tone-to-word relations) vs. retrieval (failure to access those relations in online processing). While recent work using lexical decision tasks suggests that both may play a role, one issue is that failure on a lexical decision task may reflect a lack of learner confidence about what is not a word, rather than non-native representation or processing of known words. Here we provide complementary evidence using a picture- phonology matching paradigm in Mandarin in which participants decide whether or not a spoken target matches a specific image, with concurrent event-related potential (ERP) recording to provide potential insight into differences in L1 and L2 tone processing strategies. As in the lexical decision case, we find that advanced L2 learners show a clear disadvantage in accurately identifying tone mismatched targets relative to vowel mismatched targets. We explore the contribution of incomplete/uncertain lexical knowledge to this performance disadvantage by examining individual data from an explicit tone knowledge post-test. Results suggest that explicit tone word knowledge and confidence explains some but not all of the errors in picture-phonology matching. Analysis of ERPs from correct trials shows some differences in the strength of L1 and L2 responses, but does not provide clear evidence toward differences in processing that could explain the L2 disadvantage for tones. In sum, these results converge with previous evidence from lexical decision tasks in showing that advanced L2 listeners continue to have difficulties with lexical tone recognition, and in suggesting that these difficulties reflect problems both in encoding lexical tone knowledge and in retrieving that knowledge in real time. 

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5. From sounds to words: The relation between phonological and lexical processing of tone in L2 Mandarin

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658320941546  

   Ling, Wenyi; Grüter, Theres (July 2020, Second language research)

   null (Ed.)

   Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic–phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic–phonetic dimensions in the L2 differ from those in the L1, as is the case for the L2 acquisition of Mandarin, a tonal language, by speakers of non-tonal languages like English. Previous work shows tone in L2 is perceived less categorically (Shen and Froud, 2019) and weighted less in word recognition (Pelzl et al., 2019) than in L1. However, little is known about the link between categorical perception of tone and use of tone in real time L2 word recognition at the level of the individual learner. This study presents evidence from 30 native and 29 L1-English speakers of Mandarin who completed a real-time spoken word recognition and a tone identification task. Results show that L2 learners differed from native speakers in both the extent to which they perceived tone categorically as well as in their ability to use tonal cues to distinguish between words in real-time comprehension. Critically, learners who reliably distinguished between words differing by tone alone in the word recognition task also showed more categorical perception of tone on the identification task. Moreover, within this group, performance on the two tasks was strongly correlated. This provides the first direct evidence showing that the ability to perceive tone categorically is related to the weighting of tonal cues during spoken word recognition, thus contributing to a better understanding of the link between phonemic and lexical processing, which has been argued to be a key component in the L2 acquisition of tone (Wong and Perrachione, 2007). 

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