Stress, Epenthesis, and Segment Transformation in Selayarese Loans

Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2000

The level of perception of illusory vowels

We report on results of perception experiments comparing Korean and English native speakers on stop-nasal sequences. In a categorization task, Korean listeners reported the presence of a vowel significantly more often than English listeners only when the stop was voiced. However, in an ERP experiment, both groups displayed significant MMN responses to the presence/absence of the vowel regardless of the voicing of the stop. The results of the current experiments provide evidence that language-specific perception of the absence/presence of a vowel in stop-nasal sequences takes place not at the preattentive auditory level but rather at the level of phonological categorization

Too little, too late: A longitudinal study of English corrective focus by Mandarin speakers

This study tracks the production of English corrective focus by Mandarin speakers (MS) living in the US over a two-year period. We show that the MS differed from English speakers (ES) in the alignment of the corrective focus pitch accent: while ES productions typically showed a pitch peak on the stressed syllable, followed by an abrupt fall, the pitch rise and fall for MS was later and less steep. While the MS productions became more English-like over time in some respects, the failure to correctly align pitch accent persisted over time. We argue that this misalignment of pitch peak cannot be attributed to a lack of sensitivity to English stress, but rather represents a common failure to master the complex timing patterns involved in synchronizing pitch, intensity, and duration cues with segmental structure in a second language

Native and non-native speaker processing and production of contrastive focus prosody

Several studies have found that the presence of L+H* accent on a contrastive adjective assists native-speaking listeners in narrowing the referent of the noun following the adjective (e.g., Ito & Speer 2008, Weber et al. 2006). Our study addresses two questions: whether non-native speakers use prosodic cues in processing, as previous studies have shown for native speakers, and whether there is a relationship between the use of prosodic cues in processing and in production. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and twenty-one native English speakers participated in two tasks investigating their processing and production of prosodic cues to contrastive focus. In the processing task, participants responded to the same recorded instruction containing an accented adjective in different contexts, in which the adjective was either contrastive (and therefore appropriately accented) or was repeated and followed by a contrasting noun, making focus accent on the adjective inappropriate. In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a whiteboard, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus. Overall results indicate that the Mandarin speakers made use of prosodic cues in both processing and production, although their focus prosody production differed from that of native speakers in several respects. Comparison of the results in the two experiments did not find strong correlations between processing and production. These results suggest that there is considerable heterogeneity even among native speakers in the use of prosodic cues in processing and production, and even those who do not use prosodic cues in processing may use them in production

Prosodic structure and suprasegmental features:Short-vowel stød in Danish

This paper presents a phonological analysis of a glottalization phenomenon in dialects of Danish known as ‘short-vowel stød’. It is argued that both short-vowel stød and common Danish stød involve the attachment of a laryngeal feature to a prosodic node—specifically the mora. In the case of short-vowel stød that mora lacks segmental content, as it is projected top-down due to local prosodic requirements, not bottom-up by segmental material. I show that this device provides an account of the distribution of short-vowel stød as arising from the interplay of constraints on metrical structure (both lexically stored and computed by the grammar) and the requirement for morae to be featurally licensed. The analysis provides further evidence for the analysis of ‘tonal accents’ and related phenomena in terms of metrical structure rather than lexical tone or laryngeal features, and contributes to our understanding of the relationship between segmental and suprasegmental phonology in Germanic languages

DIFFERENTIAL DIFFICULTY IN THE ACQUISITION OF SECOND LANGUAGE PHONOLOGY

This paper reports on Mandarin speakers' acquisition of English final voiced and voiceless obstruents and final labial nasals, none of which occur in Mandarin codas. The leamers' production patterns are compared with a simulation using the Gradual Leaming Algorithm (Boersma & Hayes 2001). We dernonstrate that when the Mandarin Chinese rankings are assumed as the initial state and this system is provided with representative English input, the GLA correctly models the order of acquisition of obstruent codas (voiceless before voiced). However, the GLA also predicts that voiced obstruent codas should be acquired before coda labials, which are less frequent than voiced obstruents in English. This prediction is not bome out; speakers made fewer errors with final labial nasals than with final voiced obstruents. We argue that Mandarin speakers' native language perception grammar makes perception of final obstruents more difficult than perception of final nasals, and conclude that the Mandarin learners' pattern can be understood with reference to perceived rather than absolute frequency of input structure types