Acoustic Correlates of Mizo Tones

Abstract Mizo (ISO 639-3 code: lus) is a Tibeto-Burman tone language spoken in Mizoram, India. This work provides an acoustic-phonetic description of Mizo tones spoken in Aizawl. The acoustic features of Mizo tones are modelled after the four tones in the language. The patterns of the f0 contours of the four Mizo tones in this study indicate that three have dynamic f0 contours. The analysis also shows that the f0 slope is crucial in distinguishing the four Mizo tones. Discrete Cosine Transform is used to obtain the average f0 and the f0 slope features of the Mizo tone contours represented by the first three Discrete Cosine Transform coefficients. The first three coefficients of the Discrete Cosine Transform, which are associated with the average f0 and the f0 slope of the four Mizo tone f0 contours, along with the tonal duration, can automatically classify the Mizo tones with an average accuracy of 87.12% using a quadratic discriminant analysis.