The Prosody of Two-Syllable Words in French-Speaking Monolingual and Bilingual Children: A Focus on Initial Accent and Final Accent

This study examined the acoustic characteristics of disyllabic words produced by French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 2;6 to 6;10, and by adults. Specifically, it investigated the influence of age, bilingualism, and vocabulary on final-to-initial syllable duration ratios and on the presence of initial and final accent. Children and adults took part in a word-naming task in which they produced a controlled set of disyllabic words. Duration and maximum pitch were measured for each syllable of the disyllabic word and these values were inserted into mixed-effects statistical models. Results indicated that children as young as 2;6 obtained final-to-initial syllable duration ratios similar to those of adults. Young children realized accent on the initial syllable more often and accent on the final syllable less often than older children and adults. There was no influence of bilingualism on the duration and pitch characteristics of disyllabic words. Children aged 2;6 with smaller vocabularies produced initial accent more often than children with large vocabularies. Our findings suggest that early word productions are constrained by developmental tendencies favouring falling pitch across an utterance.

Interpreting experience enhances the use of lexical stress and syllabic structure to predict L2 word endings

Prediction underlies many life’s situations including language. Monolinguals and advanced L2 learners use prosodic cues such as stress and tone in a word’s first syllable to predict the word’s suffix. To determine whether the same findings extend to words with non-morphological endings, we investigate whether Spanish monolinguals and advanced learners of Spanish with and without interpreting experience use stress (stressed, unstressed) and syllabic structure (CV, CVC) in a word’s initial syllable to predict its ending. This is crucial to understand whether associations underlying prediction are morphophonolexical associations or purely phonolexical. Interpreters were included due to their extensive experience predicting incoming speech. Participants completed an eye-tracking study where they listened to a sentence while seeing two words and selected the word they heard. Results revealed that monolinguals and interpreters predicted word endings under all conditions, but non-interpreters only predicted in the CVC oxytone condition. These findings are relevant for (1) prediction accounts, showing that phonolexical associations trigger prediction; (2) phonological models, revealing that stress and syllable information in the initial syllable are key for accessing and predicting meaning; and (3) L2 processing models, indicating that L2 learners with interpreting experience use suprasegmental information to access and predict lexical items similar to monolinguals.

Pengenalan Huruf Arab Berbasis Analogi Benda melalui Media ABATA bagi Anak Tunagrahita

Intellectually disabled children have difficulty understanding abstract things such as Arabic letters. An appropriate learning media that can help them learn is significantly needed. In addition, some Intellectually disabled children can only pronounce Arabic letters but do not know the shape of the Arabic letters. In this context, ABATA media associates and equates Arabic letters with surrounding objects in their form and pronunciation so that intellectually disabled children can know the form and pronunciation of Arabic letters. This research aims to describe the ABATA media and its effectiveness. This research uses narrative review by gathering data from various sources, analyzing and designing the media. ABATA media is designed based on visual media and adopts the analogy method by equating the form of objects with Arabic letters, and the pronunciation of Arabic letters is the same as the initial syllable of objects. Based on the search for various literature sources conducted by the researchers, ABATA media is predicted to be adequate for mentally disabled children in introducing Arabic letters. This is because the visual media and analogy methods that are the basis for developing the ABATA media have proven effective and acceptable to intellectually disabled children. Therefore, ABATA media is believed to make it easier to introduce the shape and pronunciation of Arabic letters. Keywords: Arabic letters, visual media, analogy, intellectual disability. Abstrak: Anak tunagrahita mengalami kesulitan dalam memahami hal yang bersifat abstrak, seperti huruf Arab sehingga diperlukan media yang dapat mengonkretkan hal tersebut. Selain itu, terdapat anak tunagrahita yang hanya mampu melafalkan huruf Arab namun tidak mengetahui bentuk huruf Arab tersebut. Dalam konteks ini, media ABATA mengaitkan dan menyamakan huruf Arab dengan benda-benda sekitar dalam bentuk dan pengucapannya agar anak tunagrahita mampu mengetahui bentuk sekaligus pelafalan huruf Arab. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan media ABATA dan keefektifannya secara konseptual. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode narrative review dengan mencari berbagai sumber, menganalisis, dan kemudian mendesain media. Media ABATA dirancang berbasis media bergambar dan mengadopsi metode analogi dengan menyamakan bentuk benda dengan bentuk huruf Arab. Adapun pelafalan huruf Arab disamakan dengan suku awal benda. Berdasarkan penelusuran berbagai literatur yang telah dilakukan oleh peneliti, media ABATA diprediksikan efektif untuk diterapkan kepada anak tunagrahita dalam mengenalkan huruf Arab. Hal ini didasarkan pada kenyataan bahwa media bergambar dan metode analogi yang menjadi basis pengembangan media ABATA ini terbukti efektif dan mampu diterima oleh anak tunagrahita. Oleh karena itu, media ABATA diyakini mampu mempermudah dalam pengenalan bentuk sekaligus pelafalan huruf Arab. Kata kunci: huruf Arab, media bergambar, analogi, tunagrahita

Phonological Preparation in Korean: Phoneme, or Syllable or Another Unit?

With three experiments, the present study investigated the primary phonological preparation (PP) unit in spoken word production in Korean. Adopting the form preparation paradigm, 23 native Korean speakers named pictures in homogenous or heterogenous lists. In homogenous lists, the names of the pictures shared the same initial phoneme (Experiment 1), initial consonant + vowel (i.e., CV) body (Experiment 2), or initial consonant + vowel + consonant (CVC) syllable (Experiment 3); and in heterogenous lists, the names did not share any phonological components systematically. Compared to naming pictures in heterogenous lists, participants’ naming speed was significantly faster when the initial body or the initial syllable of target names was shared. However, this form preparation effect was not shown in Experiment 1, when only the initial phoneme was shared. These results suggested that the body serves as the primary PP unit in Korean, that is, native Korean speakers tend to plan spoken words in a body–coda fashion, probably due to a joint contribution from the strong prevalence of the CV structure and early literacy instructional approach.

What motivates high vowel deletion in Québec French: foot structure or tonal profile?

Previous studies have argued that high vowel deletion (HVD) in Québec French is constrained by iterative iambic footing (Guzzo, Goad & Garcia 2016, Garcia, Goad & Guzzo 2017; see also Verluyten 1982), since it preferentially applies in even-numbered syllables from the right edge of the word. In this paper, we compare this hypothesis with an alternative hypothesis: HVD is constrained by the optionally-realized phrase-initial H tone (Jun & Fougeron 2000, Thibault & Ouellet 1996). We report on a judgement task in which two- and four-syllable nouns with HVD in the initial syllable are placed in phrases of different profiles (No determiner, Determiner + noun, Determiner + adjective + noun). If tonal profile plays a role in HVD, HVD in four-syllable nouns in phrases where the noun is in isolation or preceded by a determiner alone should be dispreferred, since the initial syllable of the noun is assigned the optional H tone in these contexts. Our results do not confirm this: HVD is favored in four-syllable nouns over two-syllable nouns, regardless of phrase type. We explain this finding by expanding our previous proposal: HVD is regulated by foot structure, but is dispreferred when it targets the head foot (where the obligatory phrase-final prominence is realized).

Featural foot in Bambara

The Bambara foot is represented as a rhythmic unit which can be disyllabic or monosyllabic. Foot-parsing is both segmentally and morphologically conditioned. A foot can coincide with a morpheme or be smaller than a morpheme, but it cannot include more than one morpheme. The main factors for foot-parsing are: types of initial consonants, types of internal consonants and vocalic combinations; directionality (left to right) is a secondary factor. Segmentation into feet is relevant for the realization of tone. Disyllabic feet are subdivided into two types, heavy and light; heavy feet have a long vowel in the initial syllable, while light feet have a short vowel in this position which is susceptible to elision (depending on phonotactics). It seems unnecessary to postulate stress in Bambara. The views of previous researchers on the Bambara foot are critically analyzed.

Initial prominence and progressive vowel harmony in Tutrugbu

One of the key elements of constraint-based formalisms is their ability to derive a variety of effects from the interaction of general constraints. As for vowel harmony, one persistent question within Optimality Theory is how to encode directionality – directly through directional harmony-driving constraints, or indirectly through asymmetric prominence patterns. This paper presents a typologically unusual case of progressive harmony triggered by prefixes in Tutrugbu. We compare analyzing harmony as purely progressive in a direct sense with an indirect analysis that motivates harmony from initial-syllable prominence. Based on both language-internal and typological evidence, we argue that the prominence-based analysis is superior. We generalize to suggest that progressive harmony should always be reducible to independent factors, and as a result, formalized indirectly through prominence.

PiNCeR: a corpus of cued-rate multiple picture naming in Dutch

PiNCeR is a corpus of speech recordings from Dutch speakers who named pictures at different speaking rates. Participants named pre-familiarised ˈ(C)CV.CVC words (e.g., snavel [ˈsnaː.vəl] “beak”) from line drawings displayed in groups of 8 arranged on a ‘clock face’. A cursor moved clockwise from picture to picture to indicate at which of three trained rates (fast, medium and slow) participants were required to name the pictures. Annotation was performed using the POnSS tool (Rodd, Decuyper, & ten Bosch, 2019), where manual and automatic segmentation is combined to yield accurate word onsets and offsets. To detect the onset and offset times of syllables within words, we identified excursions of above-average acoustic instability between the vowel of the initial syllable and the first consonant of the second syllable (Rodd, Bosker, ten Bosch, & Ernestus, 2019). This approach was licensed by careful control of segmental content in the target words to maximise correspondence between acoustics and articulation. The PiNCeR corpus was intended for use in modelling control of speaking rate (Rodd, Bosker, Ernestus, et al., 2019), but may be of interest for other purposes. Trial-level recordings from two related experiments are made available for 25 participants (12 for Experiment 1, 13 for Experiment 2), along with the onset and offset times of the words and the syllables.

Language contact and prosodic change in Slavic and Baltic

This paper discusses several Slavic and Baltic dialects which have undergone stress shifts as a result of language contact. Two types of change are discussed: (1) stress retractions from the final syllable onto the initial syllable of a prosodic word, and (2) the rise of fixed stress replacing earlier free stress. It is argued that in all cases discussed in the paper, contact with a language with fixed initial stress caused a stress shift. Examples from Croatian and Lithuanian demonstrate that pitch contours played an important role in these shifts. The results of the shifts are not always identical, but the underlying mechanism is the same in each of these cases: the lexical pitch contour of the donor language was imposed on the target language, thereby introducing constraints on the position of stress in the target language. It is argued that a similar mechanism operated in West Slavic, where languages with free stress introduced fixed stress on the initial or penultimate syllable due to contact with German and possibly Hungarian.

The role of vowel parameters in defining lexical and subsidiary stress in Ukrainian

Recent work suggests that Ukrainian represents a typologically rare bidirectional stress system with internal lapses, i.e. sequences of unstressed syllables in the vicinity of primary stress (Łukaszewicz and Mołczanow 2018a, b). The system is more intricate than the hitherto known bidirectional systems (e.g. Polish), and thus interesting from the theoretical perspective, as it involves interaction between free lexical stress and secondary stresses. Lexical and subsidiary prominence in Ukrainian have been shown to be expressed acoustically in terms of increased duration of the whole syllable. This leaves open the question of the role of classic vowel parameters in shaping prominence effects in this language. The present study fills this gap by investigating vowel duration, intensity, and F0 as potential acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Ukrainian. It focuses on words with primary stress on the fifth syllable. Such words are predicted to have secondary stress on the first and third syllables. The results point to statistically significant lengthening of vowels carrying lexical stress as well as of those in the initial syllable, but not in the third syllable. A possible explanation is that other parameters, e.g. consonant duration, may be crucial in the case of word-internal subsidiary stress in Ukrainian.