Are focus and givenness prosodically marked in Kinyarwanda and Rwandan English?

In this paper, we are interested in whether systematic variations in pitch, intensity and duration can be observed as a function of the focused or discourse-given status of a constituent in Kinyarwanda (Bantu JD61), and a relatively recent variety of “New English” in contact with this Bantu language. Kinyarwanda is a tone language, in which the information-structural notion of focus has been reported to be expressed through changes in word order, with focus appearing clause-finally (Kimyeni 1988, Ndayiragije 1999, Ngoboka 2016). In contrast, Standard English is well-known for the prosodic boost associated with narrowly focused words and the prosodic reduction of post-focal items. Cross-linguistically, the prosodic expression of focus and givenness is progressively becoming considered a marked feature. Zerbian (2015) predicts that it should not be found in a second language (L2), or a contact variety, if it is not already present in the first language of a speaker or a group of speakers. Our study finds no evidence that information focus, exhaustive focus or givenness systematically affect the prosody of Kinyarwanda. We also find no systematic effect of information structure in the variety of English spoken by our Rwandan participants, confirming that this is probably an area of English that is difficult to acquire

Are focus and givenness prosodically marked in Kinyarwanda and Rwandan English?

This paper concentrates on whether systematic variations in pitch, intensity, and duration can be observed as a function of the focused or discourse-given status of a constituent in Kinyarwanda (Guthrie code JD.61), and a relatively recent variety of “New English” in contact with this Bantu language. Kinyarwanda is a tone language, in which the information-structural notion of focus has been reported to be expressed through changes in word order, with focus appearing clause-finally (Kimenyi 1988, Ndayiragije 1999, Ngoboka 2016). In contrast, Standard English is well-known for the prosodic boost associated with narrowly focused words and the prosodic reduction of post-focal items. Crosslinguistically, the prosodic expression of focus and givenness is progressively being considered a marked feature. Zerbian (2015a) predicts that it should not be found in a second language or a contact variety if it is not already present in the first language of a speaker or a group of speakers. Our study finds no evidence that information focus, exhaustive focus, or givenness systematically affect the prosody of Kinyarwanda. We also find no systematic effect of information structure in the variety of English spoken by our Rwandan participants, confirming that this is probably an area of English that is difficult to acquire

Intonational differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa

Abstract Previous studies have shown that characteristics of a person’s first language (L1) may transfer to a second language (L2). The current study looks at the extent to which this holds for aspects of intonation as well. More specifically, we investigate to what extent traces of the L1 can be discerned in the way intonation is used in the L2 for two functions: (1) to highlight certain words by making them sound more prominent and (2) to signal continuation or finality in a list by manipulating the speech melody. To this end, the article presents an explorative study into the way focus and boundaries are marked prosodically in Zulu, and it also compares such prosodic functions in two variants of English in South Africa, i.e., English spoken as an L1, and English spoken as an L2/additional language by speakers who have Zulu as their L1. The latter language is commonly referred to as Black South African English. This comparison is interesting from a typological perspective, as Zulu is intonationally different from English, especially in the way prosody is exploited for signalling informationally important stretches of speech. Using a specific elicitation procedure, we found in a first study that speakers of South African English (as L1) mark focused words and position within a list by intonational means, just as in other L1 varieties of English, whereas Zulu only uses intonation for marking continuity or finality. A second study focused on speakers of Black South African English, and compared the prosody of proficient versus less proficient speakers. We found that the proficient speakers were perceptually equivalent to L1 speakers of English in their use of intonation for marking focus and boundaries. The less proficient speakers marked boundaries in a similar way as L1 speakers of English, but did not use prosody for signalling focus, analogous to what is typical of their native language. Acoustic observations match these perceptual results.</jats:p

Production, perception and online processing of prominence in the post-focal domain

This dissertation presents a fundamentally new and in-depth investigation of the distribution of prominence in different focal structures in two varieties of Italian (the one spoken in Udine and the one spoken in Bari), by means of the implementation of a categorical analysis with the continuous prosodic parameters related to F0 and periodic energy. Results provide evidence of the fact that prominence in these varieties of Italian is conveyed by both a categorical three-way distinction and a gradual modulation: absence or presence of pitch movement in the distinction between background (post-focal position) and the focal conditions, and a gradual modification of energy and duration. The degree of prominence of words occurring in different focal structures was also investigated in perception. The reportedly different distribution of prominence found in questions for the variety of Italian spoken in Bari is shown to have an influence in the degree of perceived prominence. This influence is found in the comparison between prominence’s ratings of Bari and Udine native speakers, as well as of Bari native speakers and German native speakers, with Italian as L2. Furthermore, the present dissertation tests the real-time processing of the pitch excursion registered in the post-focal region of questions in the Bari variety. Findings confirmed that the fine-grained changes in prominence are processed in real time. Moreover, results indicate that top-down expectations play a crucial role in modulating general cognitive processes. Overall, this thesis supports the view of prosodic prominence as characterised by a bundle of cues, probabilistically distributed in the listener’s perceptual space, which form top-down expectations that play a role both in offline perception and in online processing. Signal-based factors also play a role in perception and online processing, but can however be overridden by expectations

"Would you like RED or WHITE wine? - I would like red WINE": Native speaker perception of (non-)native intonation patterns

The importance of intonation in communication cannot be denied (Gussenhoven, 2004; Ladd, 2008). Since the goal of most foreign language learners is to successfully communicate in a language other than their mother tongue, more research on the way they are perceived by native speakers and the role of intonation in these interactions in highly relevant. For one, the correct use of pitch accents in the marking of information status is essential in many languages. For instance, in Dutch the answer "I would like red WINE" (pitch accent on the last word) would be confusing if the question was "Would you like RED or WHITE wine?", but not if the question was "Would you like red WINE or BEER?". Thus the use of an inappropriate intonation pattern may lead to miscommunication or incomprehensibility, or make interaction between communication partners more cumbersome, both in the processing of the speech (Munro & Derwing, 1999; Terken & Nooteboom, 1987; Van Leeuwen et al., 2014), and in the perceived ease of communication (Mennen, 2007). Previous research has shown that foreign language learners often transfer intonational features from their native language (L1) to any consequent language(s) they acquire (here L2) (e.g. Mennen, 2004; Swerts & Zerbian, 2010; Rasier & Hiligsmann, 2009). This is caused by the fact that the L1 and the L2 are often typologically different and so their speakers use different prosodic cues to mark focus. For example, in Dutch, new information receives a pitch accent, whereas given information usually does not (e.g., blauwe ezel, RODE ezel, 'blue donkey, RED donkey'). Yet, in Spanish the last word of the intonational phrase generally carries the pitch accent, irrespective of the information status of this ele- ment (e.g., globo rojo, burro ROJO, 'balloon red, donkey RED'). Van Maastricht, Krahmer, & Swerts (2014), who compare the pitch accent distributions produced by L1 and L2 speakers of these two languages, show that Spanish learners of Dutch as well as Dutch learners of Spanish generally transfer the pitch patterns of their L1 to their L2, especially if they are less experienced. These transfer effects found in L2 production of intonation led to the current study on the perception of L2 intonation. It aims to determine whether, since L2 speakers make a comparatively less adequate use of pitch accent distribu- tions than natives do, Dutch natives also have more difficulty processing the speech of Spanish learners of Dutch than the speech of Dutch natives. If so, a follow-up question is whether the proficiency level of the L2 speakers influences the perception process, as is the case in the production of pitch accents. Subsequently, a reaction-time (RT) task was conducted in which 41 Dutch participants were shown series of pictures of different objects in varying colors and, as the objects appeared on the screen from left to right, participants heard a description of the object and its color in Dutch (e.g. blauwe ezel, 'blue donkey'). They then indicated whether the utterance heard for the fourth picture in the series corre- sponded to what they saw on the screen by pushing a button. RTs were measured (in ms.) from the ap- pearing of the fourth picture and, simultaneously, the start of the utterance, until the participant pressed a button. Stimuli utterances were produced by four native speakers of Dutch with adequate pitch accent distributions, four Dutch natives with non-native, reversed, pitch accent distributions, four less experienced Spanish learners of Dutch (using Spanish pitch accent distributions), and four experi- enced Spanish learners of Dutch (in between Dutch and Spanish pitch accent distributions). Preliminary analyses by means of a repeated measures ANOVA show that there is an effect of na- tive language on RTs [F(3,120)=850.21, p<0.001]. It takes Dutch natives significantly longer to process Dutch spoken by Spanish natives than Dutch spoken by Dutch natives. Surprisingly, there is no signifi- cant difference between the RTs for items produced by Dutch natives using correct pitch accent distri- butions (M=798.49; SD=103.90) versus Dutch natives using non-native pitch accent distributions (M=797.85; SD=95.52). This may reflect a floor effect; the task may have been to easy for Dutch na- tives when the utterance was spoken by a Dutch native, irrespective of the intonational accuracy. Addi- tionally, RTs are significantly longer (p<0.001) when with stimuli are produced by less experienced L2 learners (M=990.95; SD=89.77), than with items produced by experienced L2 learners (M=934.73; SD=85.70). This suggests that as the speech deviates more from the native norm, adequate accent placement is more important for RTs. However, the current design makes it impossible to differentiate between the effect of segmental deviances ('foreign accent') and the effect of prosodic deviances on the intelligibility of the stimuli. Therefore, a follow-up study has been set up that controls for the segmental factors in foreign speech while varying the pitch accent distributions. Results of this experiment will be presented at the conference. References Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge University Press. Ladd, R. (2008). Intonational phonology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Maastricht, L. van, Krahmer, E., & Swerts, M. (n.d.). Acquiring native-like intonation in a second lan- guage: transfer from Dutch to Spanish and vice versa. Manuscript in preparation. Mennen, I. (2004). Bi-directional interference in the intonation of Dutch speakers of Greek. Journal of Phonetics 32(4), 543-563. Mennen, I. (2007). Phonological and phonetic influences in non-native intonation. In Trouvain, J. and Gut, U. (Eds.) Non-native Prosody: Phonetic Descriptions and Teaching Practice (pp. 53-76). Mouton De Gruyter. Munro, M., & Derwing, T. (1999). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning 49(1), 285-310. Rasier, L., & Hiligsmann, P. (2009). Exploring the L1-L2 Relationship in the L2 Acquisition of Prosody. Online proceedings of the international conference First and second languages: exploring the relationship in pedagogy-related contexts, http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ RasierHiligsmann.doc, consulted on January 16, 2013. Swerts, M., & Zerbian, S. (2010). Intonational differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa. Phonetica 67(3), 127-146. Terken, J., & Nooteboom, S. (1987). Opposite effects of accentuation and deaccentuation on verifica- tion latencies for given and new information. Language and Cognition Processes 2(3-4), 145-163. Van Leeuwen, T., Lamers, M., Peterssond, K., Gussenhoven, C., Rietvelde, T., Posera, B., et al. (2014). Phonological markers of information structure: An fMRI study. Neuropsychologia, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.03.017, consulted on April 25, 201

Acquiring native-like intonation in Dutch and Spanish: Comparing the L1 and L2 of native speakers and second language learners

ACQUIRING NATIVE-LIKE INTONATION IN DUTCH AND SPANISH Comparing the L1 and L2 of native speakers and second language learners Introduction Learning more about the interaction between the native language (L1) and the target language (L2) has been the aim of many studies on second language acquisition (SLA). Where the first studies mostly focussed on the influence of the L1 on the L2, later studies showed that the opposite is also possible, making linguistic transfer a bi-directional phenomenon (Pavlenko & Jarvis 2002). However, many of these studies concentrated on the acquisition of native-like phonology and grammar, while mostly ignoring intonation (and other suprasegmental features) as a possible distinguishing factor between L2 learners and native speakers. The studies that did look into prosodic features either did not perform an objective acoustic analysis (Rasier & Hiligsmann 2009) or were on a small scale and more concerned with analyses of formal properties of intonation and not with its functional meaning (Mennen 2004). Furthermore, former studies hardly ever took into account another factor that could be of importance in bi-directional prosodic interference, which is the proficiency level of the L2 learners. Prior work by Swerts & Zerbian (2010) on Zulu and English suggests that interference is reduced when the proficiency level of the L2 learner increases, yet their findings were based on non-acoustic analyses and did not incorporate bi-directionality. In short, although prior work has looked into several aspects of the L1-L2 relationship that seem to be relevant to SLA, no study has ever bi-directionally and systematically compared the competing prosodic systems of an L1 and an L2, while taking into account language proficiency. Moreover, most previous studies in this area are somewhat limited in scale, and have not been concerned with functional aspects of intonation, e.g. in the way it is used to mark information status in typologically different languages. In comparison with earlier work, this is the first study that we know of using an experimental design in which native and non-native Spanish and Dutch are directly compared by means of an acoustic analysis of the intonation production data of L1 speakers and early and late L2 learners. Dutch and Spanish are especially fitting for a contrastive analysis since they are known to differ with respect to the way they use intonation to mark information status. In Dutch, contextually important or new information gets accented and less important or given information is deaccented (Swerts, Krahmer & Avesani 2002). In Spanish, however, both new and given information receive a falling tone (Ramírez Verdugo 2002), and deaccentuation is not applied very often. The data collected in this study might also tell us more about the typological intonation distance between languages and consequently help us answer the question whether it is equally difficult for speakers of Dutch to acquire the Spanish intonation pattern as it is for speakers of Spanish to adapt to the Dutch intonation system. It is expected that it is easier for L1 speakers of Dutch to acquire a native-like intonation in Spanish than it is for L1 speakers of Spanish to do so for Dutch. This can be explained by the fact that Spanish has a fixed rule for using intonation in information status marking, while in Dutch the use of a certain intonation pattern is context-dependent (Rasier & Hiligsmann 2009). Method For our study 123 participants performed a speech production task designed to elicit intonation patterns in different contexts. The participants were chosen as belonging to one of the following groups: 1) native speakers of Dutch, without knowledge of Spanish (NSD), 2) native speakers of Spanish, without knowledge of Dutch (NSS), 3) less proficient Dutch learners of Spanish (DLS-), 4) proficient Dutch learners of Spanish (DLS+), 5) less proficient Spanish learners of Dutch (SLD-) and 6) proficient Spanish learners of Dutch (SLD+). During the experiment they were asked to describe short series of images depicting objects in varying colours. The fourth picture of this sequence was the target image (e.g. a blue balloon) that could have one of the following four types of information status: 1) New/New (NN), in which both the first and the second word of the NP were new in the list of pictures (e.g. green donkey, followed by blue balloon), 2) Given/New (GN), in which the second word of the NP differed from the preceding NP, but the first one was the same (e.g. blue donkey followed by blue balloon), 3) New/Given (NG), in which the first word was new in that list, but the second word corresponded (only) with the second word in the preceding picture (e.g. red balloon, followed by blue balloon) or 4) Given/Given (GG), in which both the first and the second word were used to describe the preceding picture, but not any other picture in the sequence (e.g. blue balloon, followed by blue balloon). We had four different target NPs, which resulted in 16 experimental items, which were randomized and alternated with filler items. It is expected that Dutch participants only accentuate the first word of the NP in the NG condition (e.g. red balloon, BLUE balloon), while the Spanish always accentuate the last word of the NP, irrespective of whether the first word is new or given. In addition, during the task it became clear that speakers of Spanish tended to produce the elicited NPs with a list intonation that uniformly ended in a very high boundary tone, whereas such boundary tones were less extreme in data of the speakers of Dutch. In the acoustic analysis, we measured the pitch maximum (F0) in Hertz of the two separate words of the NP. To account for the relative difference between them, the maximum F0 value of the first word was deducted from the maximum pitch value of the second word. This means that if the second word is stressed more than the first, the result is a positive difference score, and if the first word receives more stress than the second, the result is a negative difference score. It is expected that in native Spanish all the information status types receive more or less the same positive difference score, while in native Dutch at least those items in which the first word is new and the second is given (NG) receive a negative one since the first word is accentuated and the second one is not. Results & Discussion Our data confirm that Spanish and Dutch truly have competing prosodic systems concerning intonation as predicted. As figure 1 reveals, the prominence patterns produced by the Dutch speakers match the given/new distinctions in the elicited NPs (especially, when comparing the NG to the GN contexts, which result in markedly contrasting difference scores), whereas the Spanish speakers produce essentially the same intonation patterns across the different contexts. Furthermore, it appears that prosodic interference indeed takes place (see figures 2 and 3), most notably in the use of very high boundary tones by all native speakers of Spanish and the absence thereof in the speech of native speakers of Dutch. But even though the difference scores of the Spanish participants are much higher than those of the Dutch as a result of their use of higher boundary tones, the intonation pattern per information status type does seem to become more native-like when the proficiency level increases. In other words, the DLS produce less and less variation among the four contexts, and the SLD start to differentiate more between the information status types. As shown in figure 4, there is some variance between the production data of native speakers and the L1 data of SLD and DLS, which entails that prosodic interference might be bi-directional in the process of information status marking by means of intonation. Proficient SLD start to accent the new information in GN and NG contexts in Spanish as they do in their L2. Conversely, the DLS show less variation among information status types in their L1, which results in almost identical patterns in their L1 and L2, were in not for the fact that they produce higher boundary tones in their L2. The results of a more in-depth data analysis will be available at the conference. References Mennen, I. (2004). ‘Bi-directional interference in the intonation of Dutch speakers of Greek’, Journal of Phonetics, 32, 543-563. Pavlenko, A. & Jarvis, S. (2002). ‘Bidirectional transfer’, Applied Linguistics, 23, 2, 190-214. Ramirez Verdugo, D. (2002). ‘Non-native interlanguage intonation systems: a study based on a computerized corpus of Spanish learners of English’, ICAME Journal, 26, 115-132. Rasier, L. & Hiligsmann, P. (2009). ‘Exploring the L1-L2 Relationship in the L2 Acquisition of Prosody’, Online proceedings of the international conference First and second languages: exploring the relationship in pedagogy-related contexts. Consulted on 22 October 2012 on: www.education.ox.ac.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads /2010/08/RasierHiligsmann.doc. Swerts, M., Krahmer, E. & Avesani, C. (2002). ‘Prosodic marking of information status in Dutch and Italian: a comparative analysis’, Journal of Phonetics, 30, 629-654. Swerts, M. & Zerbian, S. (2010). ‘Intonational differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa’ Phonetica: internationale Zeitschrift fuer Phonetik, 67, 3, 127-145