Initial glottalization and final devoicing in polish English

This paper presents an acoustic study of the speech of Polish leaners of English. The experiment was concerned with English sequences of the type George often, in which a word-final voiced obstruent was followed by a word-initial vowel. Acoustic measurements indicated the degree to which learners transferred Polish-style glottalization on word-initial vowels into their L2 speech. Temporal parameters associated with the production of final voiced obstruents in English were also measured. The results suggest that initial glottalization may be a contributing factor to final devoicing errors. Adopting English-style ‘liaison’ in which the final obstruent is syllabified as an onset to the initial vowel is argued to be a useful goal for English pronunciation syllabi. The implications of the experiment for phonological theory are also discussed. A hierarchical view of syllabic structures proposed in the Onset Prominence environment allows for the non-arbitrary representation of word boundaries in both Polish and English

External Sandhi in L2 segmental phonetics - final (de)voicing in Polish English

The effects of external sandhi, phonological processes that span word boundaries, have been largely neglected in L2 speech research. The glottalization of word‐initial vowels in Polish may act as a “sandhi blocker” that prevents the type of liaison across word boundaries that is common in English (e.g. find out/fine doubt). This reinforces the context for another process, final obstruent devoicing, which is typical of Polish‐accented English. Clearly ‘initial’ and ‘final’ do not mean the same thing for the phonologies of the two languages. An adequate theory of phonological representation should be able to express these differences. This paper presents an acoustic study of the speech of voiced C#V sequences in Polish English. Results show that the acquisition of liaison, which entails suppression of the L1 vowel‐initial glottalization process, contributes to the error‐free production of final voiced obstruents, implying the internalization of cross‐language differences in boundary representatio

A Typology of Stress- and Foot-Sensitive Consonantal Phenomena

This article investigates consonantal alternations that are conditioned by stress and/ or foot-structure. A survey of 78 languages from 37 language families reveals three types of consonantal phenomena: (i) those strictly motivated by stress (as in Senoufo lengthening), (ii) those exclusively conditioned by foot structure (as in /h/ epenthesis in Huariapano), and (iii) those motivated both by stress and foot structure (as in flapping in American English).The fact that stress-only and foot-only consonantal phenomena are attested alongside stress/foot structure conditioned phenomena leads to the proposal that stress and foot structure can work independently, contradicting the traditional view of foot structure organization as signaled by stress-based prominence. It is proposed that four main factors are at play in the consonantal phenomena under investigation: perception, duration, aerodynamics, and prominence. Duration, aerodynamics and perceptual ambiguity are primarily phonetic, while prominence and other perceptual factors are primarily phonological. It is shown that the mechanism of Prominence Alignment in Optimality Theory captures not only consonantal alternations based on prominence, but can also be extended to those with durational and aerodynamic bases. This article also makes predictions regarding unattested stress/foot sensitive alternations connected to the four factors mentioned above

Patterns of (De)glottalization in Nivacle

Nivacle is the only Mataguayan language where glottalization in vowels has been reported as a contrastive feature. Specifically, Stell (1989:97) postulates a phonemic distinction between plain vowels and glottalized vowels. As well, she treats the glottal stop as an independent consonantal phoneme in the language. Contra Stell (1989), it is proposed that there is no phonological opposition between modal vowels vs glottalized vowels; Nivacle glottalized vowels are sequences of a vowel plus a moraic glottal stop with different prosodic parsings. The glottal stop and its associated mora can either attach to the Nucleus of the syllable or to the syllable, in coda position. As a result, two different surface realizations result (i) rearticulated/creaky vowels,and (ii) vowel-glottal coda. Unifying these several properties, it is claimed that Nivacle glottalized vowels are underlyingly bimoraic and are licensed by the head of an iambic foot; the Nivacle language has a quantity-sensitive stress system. The proposed analysis offers a principled explanation of two prosodic properties related to the distribution and characteristics of Nivacle glottalized vowels. First, duration is a statistically significant acoustic property that differentiates modal from creaky/rearticulated vowels in Nivacle; the non-modal vowels are (almost) twice as long as their modal counterparts. Second, glottalized vowels consistently deglottalize, that is, they lose their [c.g.] feature (and thus shorten) in unstressed/non-head position.Fil: Gutiérrez, Analía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Argentino de Información Científica y Tecnológica; Argentin

The effects of prosody and production planning in external t-sandhi

The change in pronunciation of word-final /t/ in English is known as external coronal stop sandhi and is understood to be motivated by several phonological conditions. Though much of the research in this area (e.g., Tanner et al., 2017, Kilbourne-Ceron et al., 2016, Coetzee and Kawahara, 2013) has generally focused on a single t-sandhi alternation within a corpus (e.g., from /t/ to /ɾ/), the results of these studies make it clear that it is always a combination of factors that play a role in each alternation. In this paper, I propose that examining the distribution of various types of t-sandhi clause-internally would provide a more complete look of where speakers preferred to use different forms of /t/ in their natural speech: tightly controlling an area of analysis would make this otherwise wide scope more manageable. This project uses two production experiments to examine the interaction between prosody and other conditioning factors on t-sandhi: established segmental contexts and findings from Production Planning studies were used to control the environment surrounding word-final /t/ and record the distribution of its pronunciation. The results of these studies show that the more marked forms of t-sandhi (in terms of production) favor prosodically defined environments not explored in previous studies: word external, clause-internal flapping exclusively preferred environments where the following word did not carry lexical stress on the first syllable; released-t’s were never produced in environments 2 where the /t/ was preceded by a vowel and followed by a consonant, and also displayed changes in production rates that were sensitive to prosodic correlates. Production planning variables also showed some expected results which show areas of interest for further t-sandhi and production experiments focused on the production planning hypothesis (Tanner et al. 2017, Kilbourne-Ceron et al. 2016)

Morphological word structure in English and Swedish : the evidence from prosody

Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundaries between morphological units, is expressed in terms of alignment constraints in Optimality Theory, where the relevant constraints require specific morphological boundaries to coincide with phonological structure (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, McCarthy & Prince 1993). The approach pursued in the present article is to investigate the distribution of phonological boundary signals to gain insight into the criteria underlying morphological analysis. The evidence from English and Swedish suggests that necessary and sufficient conditions for word-internal morphological analysis concern the recognizability of head constituents, which include the rightmost members of compounds and head affixes. The claim is that the stability of word-internal boundary effects in historical perspective cannot in general be sufficiently explained in terms of memorization and imitation of phonological word form. Rather, these effects indicate a morphological parsing mechanism based on the recognition of word-internal head constituents. Head affixes can be shown to contrast systematically with modifying affixes with respect to syntactic function, semantic content, and prosodic properties. That is, head affixes, which cannot be omitted, often lack inherent meaning and have relatively unmarked boundaries, which can be obscured entirely under specific phonological conditions. By contrast, modifying affixes, which can be omitted, consistently have inherent meaning and have stronger boundaries, which resist prosodic fusion in all phonological contexts. While these correlations are hardly specific to English and Swedish it remains to be investigated to which extent they hold cross-linguistically. The observation that some of the constituents identified on the basis of prosodic evidence lack inherent meaning raises the issue of compositionality. I will argue that certain systematic aspects of word meaning cannot be captured with reference to the syntagmatic level, but require reference to the paradigmatic level instead. The assumption is then that there are two dimensions of morphological analysis: syntagmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for decomposing words in terms of labelled constituents, and paradigmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for establishing relations among (whole) words in the mental lexicon. While meaning is intrinsically connected with paradigmatic analysis (e.g. base relations, oppositeness) it is not essential to syntagmatic analysis

Perception of allophonic cues to English word boundaries by Polish learners: Approximant devoicing in English

The study investigates the perception of devoicing of English /w, r, j, l/ after /p, t, k/ as a word-boundary cue by Polish listeners. Polish does not devoice sonorants following voiceless stops in word-initial positions. As a result, Polish learners are not made sensitive to sonorant devoicing as a segmentation cue. Higher-proficiency and lower-proficiency Polish learners of English participated in the task in which they recognised phrases such as buy train vs. bite rain or pie plot vs. pipe lot. The analysis of accuracy scores revealed that successful segmentation was only above chance level, indicating that sonorant voicing/devoicing cue was largely unattended to in identifying the boundary location. Moreover, higher proficiency did not lead to more successful segmentation. The analysis of reaction times showed an unclear pattern in which higher-proficiency listeners segmented the test phrases faster but not more accurately than lower-proficiency listeners. Finally, #CS sequences were recognised more accurately than C#S sequences, which was taken to suggest that the listeners may have had some limited knowledge that devoiced sonorants appear only in word-initial positions, but they treated voiced sonorants as equal candidates for word-final and word-initial position

Not all geminates are created equal : evidence from Maltese glottal consonants

Many languages distinguish short and long consonants or singletons and geminates. At a phonetic level, research has established that duration is the main cue to such distinctions but that other, sometimes language-specific, cues contribute to the distinction as well. Different proposals for representing geminates share one assumption: The difference between a singleton and a geminate is relatively uniform for all consonants in a given language. In this paper, Maltese glottal consonants are shown to challenge this view. In production, secondary cues, such as the amount of voicing during closure and the spectral properties of frication noises, are stronger for glottal consonants than for oral ones, and, in perception, the role of secondary cues and duration also varies across consonants. Contrary to the assumption that gemination is a uniform process in a given language, the results show that the relative role of secondary cues and duration may differ across consonants and that gemination may involve language-specific phonetic knowledge that is specific to each consonant. These results question the idea that lexical access in speech processing can be achieved through features.peer-reviewe