This paper addresses the impact of givenness on phrasal stress assignment in German. It has been observed for English that nuclear stress is rejected on given elements that are part of the focused ...material if another focused word is available to bear nuclear stress. It is shown that the same effect applies to German. There are various proposals of constraints that militate against prosodic prominence on given elements. The present paper reviews these proposals and argues in favor of a constraint that is restricted to banning nuclear stress on given elements, but not phrasal stress in general. The argument is based on the observation for German that phrasal stress commonly occurs on pre-focal given constituents and may as well be present in post-focal position. The paper offers an analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory that captures the aforementioned stress rejection effect as well as the variability observed with regard to post-nuclear phrasal stress positions.
Purpose: Supportive semantic and syntactic information can increase children's and adults' word recognition accuracy in adverse listening conditions. However, there are inconsistent findings ...regarding how a talker's accent or dialect modulates these context effects. Here, we compare children's and adults' abilities to capitalize on sentence context to overcome misleading acoustic-phonetic cues in nonnative-accented speech. Method: Monolingual American English-speaking 5- to 7-year-old children ( n = 90) and 18- to 35-year-old adults ( n = 30) were presented with full sentences or the excised final word from each of the sentences and repeated what they heard. Participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions: native-accented (Midland American English) or nonnative-accented (Spanish- and Japanese-accented English) speech. Participants also completed the NIH Toolbox Picture Vocabulary Test. Results: Children and adults benefited from sentence context for both native- and nonnative-accent talkers, but the benefit was greater for nonnative than native talkers. Furthermore, adults showed a greater context benefit than children for nonnative talkers, but the 2 age groups showed a similar benefit for native talkers. Children's age and vocabulary scores both correlated with context benefit. Conclusions: The cognitive-linguistic development that occurs between the early school-age years and adulthood may increase listeners' abilities to capitalize on top-down cues for lexical identification with nonnative-accented speech. These results have implications for the perception of speech with source degradation, including speech sound disorders, hearing loss, or signal processing that does not faithfully represent the original signal.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
While it has long been noted that the first element of most, but not of all English nominal compounds is perceptually most prominent (e.g. TABLE cloth vs. paper CUP), a principled empirical ...investigation of the acoustics, perception, and the phonological distribution of these two prominence patterns has been missing. Using a corpus of spoken language, the current volume presents the first thorough and detailed investigation of these areas, while also introducing several methodological and statistical innovations to the field.Gero Kunter, University ofSiegen, Germany.
This volume brings together papers on topics relating to the transmission of the Hebrew Bible from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. We refer to this broadly in the title of the volume as ...the ‘Masoretic Tradition’. The papers are innovative studies of a range of aspects of this Masoretic tradition at various periods, many of them presenting hitherto unstudied primary sources. They focus on traditions of vocalisation signs and accent signs, traditions of oral reading, traditions of Masoretic notes, as well as Rabbinic and exegetical texts. The contributors include established scholars of the field and early-career researchers.
Foreign accent in speech often presents listeners with challenging listening conditions. Consequently, listeners may need to draw on additional cognitive resources in order to perceive and comprehend ...such speech. Previous research has shown that, for older adults, executive functions predicted perception of speech material spoken in a novel, artificially created (and therefore unfamiliar) accent. The present study investigates the influences of executive functions, information processing speed, and working memory on perception of unfamiliar foreign accented speech, in healthy young adults. The results showed that the executive processes of inhibition and switching, as well as information processing speed predict response times to both accented and standard sentence stimuli, while inhibition and information processing speed predict speed of responding to accented word stimuli. Inhibition and switching further predict accuracy in responding to accented word and standard sentence stimuli that has increased processing demand (i.e., nonwords and sentences with unexpected semantic content). These findings suggest that stronger abilities in aspects of cognitive functioning may be helpful for matching variable pronunciations of speech sounds to stored representations, for example by being able to manage the activation of incorrect competing representations and shifting to other possible matches.
An underlying form like /maːli/ is problematic for a stress system requiring word-final, bimoraic trochees. The grammar must sacrifice word-finality or bimoraicity, (máː)li or (máːli) (tolerating ...HL#); place stress on the second half of the long vowel, ma(áli) (breaking); or shorten the vowel, (máli) (trochaic shortening). This article surveys the Central Pacific language family, which hosts the most famous cases of breaking (Tongan) and trochaic shortening (Fijian), and finds that while trochaic shortening is poorly attested, breaking and tolerance are common. There are three findings of theoretical interest. First, length alternations suggest it is difficult to learn contrastive information that is absent in the core member of the morphological paradigm. Second, lexicalization of whole words is a possible response to this difficulty. Third, there is divergence between a language’s root phonotactics and its alternations.
This study is a comprehensive analysis to conceptualize the transparent borders between second language L2 learners and the imaginary image of the novel mentally interactive settings they emerged in. ...As this novel experience of L2 learners entails a sort of sociocultural shift through shifting language, it requires learners to shift identity as well. This study sheds the light on the linguistic situational contexts that motivate L2 learner's identity to be both unconsciously and consciously shifted. This study argues that the L2 learner's identity is unable to receive a full macro shift, rather it experiences a micro one, hypothetically proposed as "identity-version shift". This study concludes with a systematic list, each of which guides the learner's identity version shift: 1) the identity-version shift is mandatory, 2) the identity-version shift is basically motivated by a situated linguistic context, 3) The new version should carry better image than the old one or more socially appropriate, 4) Implicit developing language can offer more authentic stable identity "i.e. children language", 5) Reconstructing fully new identity is impossible, 6) Shifting between two identities is irrational unless with whom suffer from Schizophrenia.
While some accounts of syllable weight deny a role for onsets, onset-sensitive weight criteria have received renewed attention in recent years (e.g. Gordon 2005, Topintzi 2010). This article presents ...new evidence supporting onsets as factors in weight. First, in complex stress systems such as those of English and Russian, onset length is a significant attractor of stress both in the lexicon and in nonce probes. This effect is highly systematic and unlikely, it is argued, to be driven by analogy alone. Second, in flexible quantitative meters (e.g. in Sanskrit), poets preferentially align longer onsets with heavier metrical positions, all else being equal. A theory of syllable weight is proposed in which the domain of weight begins not with the rime but with the p-center (perceptual center) of the syllable, which is perturbed by properties of the onset. While onset effects are apparently universal in gradient weight systems, they are weak enough to be usually eclipsed by the structure of the rime under categorization. This proposal therefore motivates both the existence of onset weight effects and the subordination of the onset to the rime with respect to weight.
The correct location of lexical stress is a main concern for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners whose first language has a different stress system. Therefore, in light of the fact that ...pronunciation errors in English are often the result of the Farsi language sound system transfer, the present study examined the impact of phonetic transcription on Iranian undergraduate EFL students' word stress learning. The quasi-experimental design was used to study two classes of EFL major students at the University of Bojnord (UB) and Kosar University of Bojnord (KUB) as the experimental group (EG) and control group (CG) respectively. A 60-item word stress test was developed by the researcher based on 20 lessons of The Flatmates from the BBC's learning English website to examine the learners' achievements. The test reliability was determined to be 0.71 through KR-21 formula. The independent samples t-test results indicated that the EG outperformed the CG. Thus, the findings suggest that EFL learners' phonetic transcription can facilitate the process of lexical stress learning.
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