Abstract
In the field of psycholinguistics, until recently tone languages have received scarce attention compared to Germanic and Romance languages, particularly in the area of language acquisition. This is despite the fact that 60-70 percent of the world’s languages are tonal, and spoken by some of the world’s largest language groups (Yip, 2002). In Southeast Asia, tone languages are prominent, with the better-known and researched tone languages including Thai, Vietnamese, and all of those within the Chinese family of languages (e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese or Yue, and Shanghai or Min, to name a few). In this chapter we will present a number of methods by which tones can be described and compared, ahead of three examples of research using variations of a relatively recent method, that of tone space mapping.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | South and Southeast Asian Psycholinguistics |
| Editors | Heather Winskel, Prakash Padakannaya |
| Place of Publication | U.K. |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Pages | 233-246 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781107017764 |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |