Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch

Testing the Role of Phonetic Naturalness in Mandarin Tone Sandhi

33 Yuwen Lai The University of Kansas [email protected] It has long been noted that phonological patterning is influenced by phonetic factors. But phonologists diverge on whether phonetic motivations take effect in synchronic or diachronic phonology. This article aims to tease apart the two theories by investigating native Mandarin speakers’ applications of two tone sandhi processes to novel words: the phonetically motivated contour reduction 213 21/__T (T 213) and the neutralizing 213 35/__213 whose phonetic motivations are less clear. Twenty Mandarin subjects were asked to produce two monosyllables they heard as disyllabic words. Five groups of disyllabic words were tested: AO-AO (AO=actual occurring morpheme) where the disyllable is also a real word, AO-AO’ where the disyllable is nonoccurring, AO-AG (AG=accidental gap in Mandarin lexicon — legal syllable and tone but non-existent combination), AG-AO, and AG-AG. The first syllable is always 213, and the second syllable has one of the four tones in Mandarin. Results show that speakers apply the phonetically more natural 213 21 sandhi more quickly and with greater accuracy than the 213 35 sandhi. Theoretically, the study supports the direct relevance of phonetics to synchronic phonology by showing that there is a psychological advantage to phonetically natural patterns. Methodologically, it complements existing research paradigms that test the nature of the phonology-phonetics relationship, e.g., the study of phonological acquisition and the artificial language paradigm; when extended to other Chinese dialects, it can also provide insights into the long-standing mystery of how Chinese speakers internalise complicated tone sandhi patterns that sometimes involve opacity, near-neutralization, and syntactic dependency

Vowel purity and rhyme evidence in Old Chinese reconstruction

Rhyme patterns in Old Chinese poems are important for the reconstruction of Old Chinese pronunciation, as they provide evidence for groups of words which formerly had similar pronunciation. Rhyme patterns can also be used to test Old Chinese reconstruction systems for consistency and plausibility, as reconstruction systems should minimize the conflict with attested rhyme patterns. Here, we build on the idea that rhyming in Old Chinese followed the principle of vowel purity, a tendency to disallow rhymes of words with different vowels, to develop a quantitative test for reconstruction systems of Old Chinese. The test is illustrated by comparing seven different Old Chinese reconstruction systems and by showing that, although the systems differ regarding their degree of vowel purity, the principle seems to hold for Old Chinese rhyme data

Tone Sandhi Phenomena In Taiwan Southern Min

This dissertation investigates various aspects of the tone sandhi phenomena in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM). Previous studies have reported complete tonal neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants derived respectively from citation 55 and 24 variants, leading to the claim that tone sandhi in this language is categorical. The fact that tone sandhi in TSM is assumed to possess a mixture of properties of lexical and postlexical rules gives rise to the debate over the status of this phonological rule. The findings of the dissertation shows incomplete neutralization between the two sandhi 33 variants with an indication of an ongoing sound change towards a near- or complete tonal merger, possibly led by female speakers. In addition, citation form is proposed to be more underlyingly represented on account of the fact that subjects, especially old speakers, have stronger association with citation variants than with sandhi variants in the priming experiment. The spontaneous corpus study suggests that the Tone Circle is merely a phonological idealization in light of the systematic subphonemic difference in f0 between citation X and sandhi X that are supposed to correspond even with some control of conceivable confounding factors. By comparing direct- and indirect-reference models, I argue that tone sandhi in TSM should be analyzed as a head-left Concatenation rule within a DM-based theoretical framework