Tonal Alignment and Segmental Timing in English-speaking Children

Tonal alignment has been shown to be sensitive to segmental timing. This suggests that development of the former may be influenced by the latter. The developmental literature reports that English-speaking children do not attain adult-like competence in segmental timing until after age 6. While this suggests that the ability for alignment may be mastered after this age, this possibility is speculative due to paucity of data. Accordingly, the present study sought to determine whether 7- and 8-year old English-speaking children exhibit adult-like alignment and segmental timing in their speech. Seven children (ages 7 and 8) and 10 adults (ages 19 to 24) repeated pre-recorded sentences. Their productions were analyzed acoustically. The children showed adult-like performance on three out of four measures of alignment. They performed comparably with adults on all measures of segmental timing. These results suggest that the English-speaking children’s ability for alignment may reach adult levels after mastery of segmental timing

Alignment of high tones in regional French: a case study

In regional French, tonal alignment has been understudied and remains an important empirical question. In this paper, samples of text readings from two historically related dialects - Quebec and Vendée varieties - are examined to determine whether these dialects exhibit differences in alignment of stress group initial and final peaks with respect to vowel boundaries. The results of this preliminary analysis showed that although in both varieties the peaks are more stable with respect to vowel end, when it comes to vowel onset Canadian speakers realize the peaks significantly later than the European participants

Intonation and variation: the multiplicity of forms and senses

This work focuses on the multiplicity of forms which the intonation patterns may have and the multiple senses they express. The background for discussing these issues is vocal gestuality taken as an index of the biological, psychological and social characteristics of the speaker. The intonation sound patterns vary according to sociolinguistic features, dialect type and speech style and they are used to express modalities, regional and social characteristics, propositional and social attitudes and affective states. The intervening factors in the relation between form and meaning are numerous and they interfere with the perception of the intonation patterns. Results from acoustic and perceptual experiments in several languages are presented and their contribution to the study of the communicative functions and variability of intonation are discussed

Second language acquisition of intonation: Peak alignment in American English

The objective of the present study was to investigate (1) whether, and to what degree, late bilinguals of different L1 backgrounds are comparable to native speakers in the phonetic implementation of tonal targets in their L2, (2) whether they exhibit general patterns of acquisition irrespective of the typological closeness of their L1 to their L2, and (3) whether learners’ choice of accent contours and the alignment of the high tone (H∗) proceeds in parallel with proficiency in the L2. More specifically, we examined the acquisition of the nuclear contour composition and the H∗ alignment of the American English (L)H∗L- (i.e. pitch accent and boundary tone combination) in initial-stressed and final-stressed words by Japanese and Spanish late bilingual speakers at varying proficiency levels in American English. Our results show that the L1 Spanish speakers were more comparable than the L1 Japanese speakers to the native English speakers in the phonological aspect of intonation (choice of pitch accent contour). In terms of peak alignment, we found that the late bilinguals generally tended to realise significantly later alignment than the native speakers, although the precise manifestation of this varied according to the L1 background of speakers and the stress pattern of words.This research was supported by a PhD scholarship awarded to the first author from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and St John's College, University of Cambridge, and by a PhD research support grant from the Japan Foundation. These sources of support are gratefully acknowledged

Cappadocian in the social media era

Until very recently, Cappadocian Greek seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Linguists and dialectologists even believed it had become extinct altogether. However, one Cappadocian variety, Mišótika, is still spoken in some villages and towns in the decentralized administrations of Macedonia and Thrace, Epirus and Western Macedonia, and Thessaly and Central Greece. The dialect is undergoing attrition under the growing pressure of Standard Modern Greek and its regional varieties and is actually being re-Hellenized. Even the oldest speakers make free use of Greek instead of Misiótika words and expressions and attrition is noticeable in at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. As a result, there are now many semi- or even would-be speakers whose speech is located somewhere on a continuum from Mišótika with Standard or Regional Modern Greek elements in it to Standard or Regional Modern Greek with Mišótika elements in it - in both cases mostly words and phrases. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a growing interest in Mišótika as a marker of (Mišótika) Cappadocian identity. Speakers feel more confident to speak their language in public, for instance at the annual Gavoustima, where theatrical plays in Mišótika are now regularly performed by the syllogos of Néo Agionéri (to the amusement and also to bewilderment of the audience). Remarkably and very fortunately, Mišótika is now also used in the Social Media. I will concentrate here on Facebook, especially on the page called Έναρξη Διδασκαλίας Εκµάθησης Μυστιώτικου Ιδιώµατος ( group 470281169768316 on FB). The title is identical with the subtitle of Thomas Fates’ book Χ͜ιογός α ας χαρίσ̌’, which is some sort of “Teach Yourself Mišótika” and in which, interestingly, a special orthography for Mišótika has been developed. I will discuss the kind of information found on the FB page: questions, questionnaires, explanations of words and short phrases, folktales and other short stories, audio & video clips etc. Particular attention will be paid to the problems of using the Greek alphabet to write Mišótika in relation to the ongoing phonological attrition and also to the insecurity when it comes to interpretation linguistic phenomena in Mišótika

Drifting without an anchor: how pitch accents withstand vowel loss

We offer an analysis of the influence exerted by segmental rules on the suprasegmental structure in the dialect of Ipiros Greek (IG). In particular we investigated how vowel deletion (VD) affects the phonetic realization of the L*+H pitch accent. Our data empirically establish that the H tone aligns much earlier when VD applies than when it does not. Furthermore, we show that there is a phonological contrast between the nuclear L+H* and the prenuclear L*+H which hinges on early versus late H alignment respectively. We demonstrate that the contrast between the L*+H and the L+H* pitch accents is not compromised by the earlier alignment caused by VD. In other words, intonational contrasts are not endangered by fine phonetic alignment variability within the same category

Identifying and describing prosodic domain interaction with duration and hyperarticulation

Motivated by the ambiguities of prosodic constituency and prosodic domain interaction, this study asks whether pitch accent acts upon non-segmental features (specifically right-edge word boundaries), as well as whether or not right-edge word boundaries induce hyperarticulation in the preceeding syllable. By looking at the duration of diphthongs in both word-initial and word-final positions, my research shows that pitch accent does indeed appear to hyperarticulate word boundaries, giving evidence to prosodic interactions across different phonological domains. Additionally, with few exceptions, the data collected in this study support the hypothesis that right-edge word boundaries do not hyperarticulate preceding diphthongs. These results contribute to current discourse regarding prosodic domain interactions. Finally, this work proposes and employs a method of measuring hyperarticulation in diphthongs, a process yet unexplored, using first and second formant values