The L2 acquisition of syllable structure and stress in Spanish.

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An exploration of minimal and maximal metrical feet

This thesis presents a principled theory of bounded recursive footing. Building on previous research on metrical stress, and couched within the framework of Prosodic Hierarchy Theory, I argue that the rehabilitation of recursive feet in phonological representations leads to an improvement of our theory of prosody. I investigate the major driving forces that may cause recursion at the foot level and demonstrate that reference to recursive and non-recursive feet in various related and unrelated languages (e.g. Wargamay, Yidiɲ, Chugach, English, Dutch, German, Gilbertese, Seneca, Ryukyuan, Tripura Bangla, Cayuvava) allows us to provide a unified account of a wide range of prosodically-conditioned phenomena which would otherwise remain unexplained. In particular, I demonstrate that the assignment of binary and ternary stress, certain tonal distributions, some puzzling cases of vowel lengthening, consonant fortition, vowel reduction and consonant weakening all clearly benefit from recursion-based analyses. In arguing for the need for recursive feet in phonological representations, I identify new strength relations in prosodic systems. Besides the well-established strength dichotomy between the head of a foot (i.e. the strong branch of a foot) and the dependent of a foot (i.e. its weak branch), I show that languages may distinguish between further metrical prominence positions. These additional required positions do not need to be stipulated as they come for free in a framework that allows recursion at the level of the foot

The perception of lexical stress in German: effects of segmental duration and vowel quality in different prosodic patterns

Several decades of research, focusing on English, Dutch and German, have set up a hierarchy of acoustic properties for cueing lexical stress. It attributes the strongest cue to criterial-level f0 change, followed by duration, but low weight to energy and to stressed-vowel spectra. This paper re-examines the established view with new data from German. In the natural productions of the German word pair Kaffee 'coffee' - Café 'locality' (with initial vs. final stress in a North German pronunciation), vowel duration was manipulated in a complementary fashion across the two syllables in five steps, spanning the continuum from initial to final stress on each word. The two base words provided different vowel qualities as the second variable, the intervocalic fricative was varied in two values, long and short, taken from Café and Kaffee, and the generated test words were inserted in a low f0 tail and in a high f0 hat-pattern plateau, which both eliminated f0 change as a cue to lexical stress. The sentence stimuli were judged in two listening experiments by 16 listeners in each as to whether the first or the second syllable of the test word was stressed. The results show highly significant effects of vowel duration, vowel quality and fricative duration. The combined vowel-quality and fricative variable can outweigh vowel duration as a cue to lexical stress. The effect of the prosodic frame is only marginal, especially related to a rhythmic factor. The paper concludes that there is no general hierarchy with a fixed ranking of the variables traditionally adduced to signal lexical stress. Every prosodic embedding of segmental sequences defines the hierarchy afresh

Quantity-sensitive stress and syllable weight in Paiwan

This study reexamines the assignment of stress in the Paiwan language spoken in several central Paiwan villages, which differs from the other communalects in treating the central vowel, schwa /ə/, as a weak element with regards to the syllable and stress. Contrary to previous quality-sensitive analyses, this paper explores new data and argues for a quantity-sensitive account based on a variable weight system for closed syllables. It is shown that the inherently non-moraic coda consonants gain weight only to satisfy the requirement for an appropriate foot head. The special behavior of schwa in stress assignment also parallels to other phonological evidence in Paiwan such as its distributional restriction

Prosodically controlled derivations in the mental lexicon

Swedish morphemes are classified as prosodically specified or prosodically unspecified, depending on lexical or phonological stress, respectively. Here, we investigate the allomorphy of the suffix -(i)sk, which indicates the distinction between lexical and phonological stress; if attached to a lexically stressed morpheme, it takes a non-syllabic form (-sk), whereas if attached to a phonologically stressed morpheme, an epenthetic vowel is inserted (-isk). Using mismatch negativity (MMN), we explored the neural processing of this allomorphy across lexically stressed and phonologically stressed morphemes. In an oddball paradigm, participants were occasionally presented with congruent and incongruent derivations, created by the suffix -(i)sk, within the repetitive presentation of their monomorphemic stems. The results indicated that the congruent derivation of the lexically stressed stem elicited a larger MMN than the incongruent sequences of the same stem and the derivational suffix, whereas after the phonologically stressed stem a non-significant tendency towards an opposite pattern was observed. We argue that the significant MMN response to the congruent derivation in the lexical stress condition is in line with lexical MMN, indicating a holistic processing of the sequence of lexically stressed stem and derivational suffix. The enhanced MMN response to the incongruent derivation in the phonological stress condition, on the other hand, is suggested to reflect combinatorial processing of the sequence of phonologically stressed stem and derivational suffix. These findings bring a new aspect to the dual-system approach to neural processing of morphologically complex words, namely the specification of word stress.Peer reviewe

Gesture-speech coupling in L2 lexical stress production: A pre-registration of a speech acoustic and gesture kinematic study

The prosody of a second language (L2) is notoriously difficult to acquire. It requires the mastery of a range of nested multimodal systems, including articulatory but also gestural signals, as hand gestures are produced in close synchrony with spoken prosody. It remains unclear how easily the articulatory and gestural systems acquire new prosodic patterns in the L2 and how the two systems interact, especially when L1 patterns interfere. This interdisciplinary pre-registered study investigates how Dutch learners of Spanish produce multimodal lexical stress in Spanish-Dutch cognates (e.g., Spanish profeSOR vs. Dutch proFESsor). Acoustic analyses assess whether gesturing helps L2 speakers to place stress on the correct syllable; and whether gesturing boosts the acoustic correlates of stress through biomechanic coupling. Moreover, motion-tracking and time-series analyses test whether gesture-prosody synchrony is enhanced for stress-matching vs. stress-mismatching cognate pairs, perhaps revealing that gestural timing is biased in the L1 (or L2) direction (e.g., Spanish profeSOR with the gesture biased towards Dutch stressed syllable -fes). Thus, we will uncover how speakers deal with manual, articulatory, and cognitive constraints that need to be brought in harmony for efficient speech production, bearing implications for theories on gesture-speech interaction and multimodal L2 acquisition