Consonant effects on tonal registers in Jiashan Wu

Breathy phonation is known as the primary cue of the “voiced” stops in Wu dialects, and is associated with the lower tonal register. This study discusses the phonetic realization of the tonal register of Wu dialects by measuring relative prominence of the first harmonic to some higher-frequency components in the spectrum, F0 and periodicity (CPP) of Jiashan Wu monosyllabic words. We find that in Jiashan Wu, the phonetic targets for tonal register contrasts are a steeper spectral-slope and a lower F0, which is consistent cross all consonant manners, while the articulatory realization varies among different types of consonants

Lexical Stress Realization in Mandarin Second Language Learners of English: An Acoustic and Articulatory Study

This dissertation investigated the acoustic and articulatory correlates of lexical stress in Mandarin second language (L2) learners of English, as well as in first language (L1) speakers. The present study used a minimal pair respective to stress location (e.g., OBject versus obJECT) obtained from a publicly available Mandarin Accented English Electromagnetic articulography corpus dataset. In the acoustic domain, the use of acoustic parameters (duration, intensity, F0, and vowel quality) was measured in stressed and unstressed vowels. In the articulatory domain, the positional information from tongue tip (TT), tongue dorsum (TD), upper lip (UL), lower lip (LL), and jaw (JAW) were retrieved from the concurrent vowel data. Finally, the acoustic and articulatory correlation was computed and compared both within and across groups. The acoustic analysis demonstrated that L2 speakers significantly differentiated the stressed vowels from the unstressed vowels using all suprasegmental cues, while vowel quality was extremely limitedly used in the L2 group. In the articulatory analysis, Mandarin L2 speakers demonstrated the extremely limited lexical stress effect. A significant difference as a function of lexical stress was noted only in the vertical dimension of low-back vowels. The acoustic and articulatory correlation results revealed a relatively weaker correlation in L2 speakers than in L1 speakers. In the L2 group, certain articulators such as TD and the JAW demonstrated a stronger correlation than LL and TT

A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters