On past participle agreement in transitive clauses in French

This paper provides a Minimalist analysis of past participle agreement in French in transitive clauses. Our account posits that the head v of vP in such structures carries an (accusativeassigning) structural case feature which may apply (with or without concomitant agreement) to case-mark a clause-mate object, the subject of a defective complement clause, or an intermediate copy of a preposed subject in spec-CP. In structures where a goal is extracted from vP (e.g. via wh-movement) v also carries an edge feature, and may also carry a specificity feature and a set of (number and gender) agreement features. We show how these assumptions account for agreement of a participle with a preposed specific clausemate object or defective-clause subject, and for the absence of agreement with an embedded object, with the complement of an impersonal verb, and with the subject of an embedded (finite or nonfinite) CP complement. We also argue that the absence of agreement marking (in expected contexts) on the participles faitmade and laissélet in infinitive structures is essentially viral in nature. Finally, we claim that obligatory participle agreement with reflexive and reciprocal objects arises because the derivation of reflexives involves A-movement and concomitant agreement

Putting Prosody First – Some Practical Solutions to a Perennial Problem: The Innovalangues Project

This paper presents some of the difficulties of teaching languages, in particular English, in the context of LSP/LAP2 programmes in French universities. The main focus of this paper will be the importance of prosody, especially in English, as an area where these difficulties may be addressed. We will outline the various solutions that are currently being put into place as part of the Innovalangues project, a six-year international language teaching and research project headed by Université Stendhal (Grenoble 3), France. The project has substantial funding from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and its mission is to develop innovative tools and measures to help LSP/LAP learners reach B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). The languages concerned are English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and possibly French as a foreign language. Initially the project will be focusing on the needs of Grenoble’s students, but the objective is to make the tools and resources developed freely available to the wider community. Oral production and reception are at the heart of Innovalangues. We believe, along with many other researchers, that prosody is key to comprehension and to intelligibility (Kjellin 1999a, Kjellin 1999b, Munro and Derwing 2011, Saito 2012), particularly given the important differences between English and French prosody (Delattre 1965; Hirst and Di Cristo 1998; Frost 2011). In this paper, we will present the particular difficulties inherent in teaching English (and other foreign languages) in the context of ESP/EAP3 in French universities and some of the solutions that we are implementing through this project (Picavet et al., 2012; Picavet et al 2013; Picavet and Frost 2014). These include an e-learning platform for which various tools are being developed, teacher training seminars focusing on prosody and the collection of data for research

Spectral and temporal implementation of Japanese speakers' English vowel categories : a corpus-based study

This study investigates the predictions of second language (L2) speech acquisition models — SLM(-r), PAM(-L2), and L2LP — on how native (L1) Japanese speakers implement the spectral and temporal aspects of L2 American English vowel categories. Data were obtained from 102 L1 Japanese speakers in the J-AESOP corpus, which also includes nativelikeness judgments by trained phoneticians. Spectrally, speakers judged to be non-nativelike showed a strong influence from L1 categories, except L2 /ʌ/ which could be deflected away from L1 /a/ according to SLM(-r) and L2 /ɑː/ which seemed orthographically assimilated to L1 /o/ according to PAM(-L2). More nativelike speakers showed vowel spectra similar to those of native English speakers across all vowels, in accordance with L2LP. Temporally, although speakers tended to equate the phonetic length of English vowels with Japanese phonemic length distinctions, segment-level L1-L2 category similarity was not a significant predictor of the speakers’ nativelikeness. Instead, the implementation of prosodic-level factors such as stress and phrase-final lengthening were better predictors. The results highlight the importance of suprasegmental factors in successful category learning and also reveal a weakness in current models of L2 speech acquisition, which focus primarily on the segmental level. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed

Interaction between Phrasal Structure and Vowel Tenseness in German: An Acoustic and Articulatory Study

Phrase-final lengthening affects the segments preceding a prosodic boundary. This prosodic variation is generally assumed to be independent of the phonemic identity. We refer to this as the ‘uniform lengthening hypothesis’ (ULH). However, in German, lax vowels do not undergo lengthening for word stress or shortening for increased speech rate, indicating that temporal properties might interact with phonemic identity. We test the ULH by comparing the effect of the boundary on acoustic and kinematic measures for tense and lax vowels and several coda consonants. We further examine if the boundary effect decreases with distance from the boundary. Ten native speakers of German were recorded by means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) while reading sentences that contained six minimal pairs varying in vowel tenseness and boundary type. In line with the ULH, the results show that the acoustic durations of lax vowels are lengthened phrase-finally, similarly to tense vowels. We find that acoustic lengthening is stronger the closer the segments are to the boundary. Articulatory parameters of the closing movements toward the post-vocalic consonants are affected by both phrasal position and identity of the preceding vowel. The results are discussed with regard to the interaction between prosodic structure and vowel tenseness.Peer Reviewe

Social Meaning in Prosodic Variability

An analysis of six characters from a Chinese television drama reveals socially meaningful patterns of variation in rhythm and final lengthening. Two measures of rhythm, the syllabic PVI and Varco∆S, reveal the three female characters to be more “stress-timed” than the three male characters; smoothing splines analysis, meanwhile, shows that the women do more lengthening of utterance-final syllables than the men. Interspeaker differences in rhythm among the men suggest that the social meaning of rhythmic variability may be linked to a cultural binary between “martial” and “refined” masculinities. This study opens up new avenues in the sociolinguistic study of rhythm and prosody, which has not seen widely reported gender differences in rhythm; as well it is the first study of final lengthening as a sociolinguistic variable in its own right

Individual Differences in the Production and Perception of Prosodic Boundaries in American English

Theoretical interest in the relation between speech production and perception has led to research on whether individual speaker-listeners’ production patterns are linked to the information they attend to in perception. However, for prosodic structure, the production-perception relation has received little attention. This dissertation investigates the hypothesis that individual participants vary in their production and perception of prosodic boundaries, and that the properties they use to signal prosodic contrasts are closely related to the properties used to perceive those contrasts. In an acoustic study, 32 native speakers read eight sentence pairs in which the type of prosodic boundary (word and Intonational Phrase boundary) differed. Phrase-final and initial temporal modulation, pause duration, and pitch reset at the boundaries were analyzed. Results showed that, as a group, speakers lengthened two phrase-final syllables, shortened the post-boundary syllable, and produced a pause and pitch reset when producing an IP boundary. However, individual speakers differed in both the phonetic features they used and the degree to which they used them to distinguish IP from word boundaries. Speakers differed in the onset and scope of phrase-final lengthening and presence of shortening (resulting in six different patterns), pause duration, and the degree of pitch reset at the IP boundary, including in ways that demonstrated a trading relation between these properties for some individuals and an enhancement relation for others. The results suggest that individuals differ in how they encode prosodic structure and offer insights into the complex mechanism of temporal modulation at IP boundaries. In an eye-tracking study that tested the perceptual use of these acoustic properties by 19 of these same participants, the productions of a model talker were manipulated to systematically vary the presence and degree of IP boundary cues. Twelve unique combinations of cues, based on the main patterns in the production study, were created from four phrase-final lengthening patterns, two pause durations (presence/absence of a pause), and three pitch reset values. Patterns of fixation on the target boundary image over time showed that, as a group, listeners attended to the information conveyed by pause duration and final lengthening as that information became available, with pause being the most salient cue for IP boundary perception. A clear pattern did not emerge for pitch reset. Adding to the body of research on weighting of the acoustic properties for IP boundary, these results characterize the time-course of the perceptual use of different combinations of IP boundary-related properties. To examine the production-perception relation, a series of perceptual models in which each participant’s average production values were entered as predictor variables tested whether the production patterns are reflected in the same individuals’ perception. The results did not provide statistically significant evidence of a production-perception relation, although a trend in the pause duration models across three different conditions was suggestive of a pattern in which individuals with longer pause durations were faster to fixate on the IP boundary target than those with shorter pause durations. The lack of evidence of a close production-perception relation for individual speaker-listeners is inconsistent with the main hypothesis but is in line with the results of several previous studies that have investigated this relation for segmental properties. Further investigation is needed to determine whether, despite the absence of a strong production-perception relation, specific individuals might nonetheless show the link predicted by some theoretical approaches.PHDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162927/1/jiseungk_1.pd

The status of the word-final domain and linguistically-constrained language learning cues

Past experimental and theoretical research have argued that phonological devoicing as a word-final phenomenon only has inherent phonetic motivation to exist utterance-finally and that its presence at lower domain levels is due to analogy (Hock 1991, 1999; Hualde and Eager 2016). This evinces the idea that the word is not a domain tied to phonology inherently. Juxtaposingly, final devoicing (FD) is found phonetically at various prosodic domain levels. Final lengthening (FL) is also found at various prosodic levels, though is explained as only having a push to exist utterance-finally through a process similar to the “slowing down of a machine” or “tempo change...local to the final gesture in the phrase” (Klatt 1976 and Edwards et al. 1991 respectively). The present artificial language learning (ALL) experiment gives evidence that these cues may have an inherent reason for existing at lower domain levels. Participants were exposed to 7 minutes of AL stimulus in one of three conditions: transitional probabilities (TP) or the likelihood that syllables will occur in sequence together, final lengthening (FL) or greater duration of final segments, and final devoicing (FD) or a trailing off of voicing in word-final segments. They were then tested on their ability to segment the AL words out of the speech stream. The results show there is a perceptual effect to having phonetic FL at the right edge of words for listeners, in that it increases novel word segmentation ability above the level of only TPs. The same effect was not found for FD. The FL results indicate that phenomena in the word-final area may be used for perceptual reasons, providing evidence speakers use phonetic effects at the word-level

Dialectal phonology constrains the phonetics of prominence

Accentual prominence has well-documented effects on various phonetic properties, including timing, vowel quality, amplitude, and pitch. These cues can exist in trading relationships and can differ in magnitude in different languages. Less is understood about how phonetic cues to accentuation surface under different phonological constraints, such as those posed by segmental phonology, aspects of the prosodic hierarchy, and intonational phonology. Dialectal comparisons offer a valuable window on these issues, because dialects of a language share basic aspects of structure and function, but can differ in key segmental and suprasegmental constraints which may affect the cues that realise accentual prominence. We compared the realisation of trochaic words (e.g. cheesy, picky) in accented/unaccented and phrase-final/non-final positions in two dialects of British English, Standard Southern British English, and Standard Scottish English as spoken in Glasgow. We found generally shallower prominence gradients for Glasgow than SSBE with respect to intensity and duration, and very little evidence of accentual lengthening of vowels in Glasgow, compared to robust effects in SSBE. In contrast, phrase-finality had similar effects across the two dialects. The differences observed illustrate how the expression of accentual prominence reflects and reveals the different segmental and intonational systems that operate within dialects of the same language