It is widely assumed, first, that errors of English intonation by learners represent a significant barrier to effective communication and, second, that these errors result from differences between the intonation systems of English and the learners' mother tongues. However, little work has been done to establish the extent of the errors, their characteristics, or their origin. This study compares intonation in a corpus of recordings from 12 adult native-speaker informants and 12 adult learners of English, four each from Korea, Greece and Indonesia. The main data analysed are 24 parallel readings of a scripted dialogue. Findings are checked against intonation choices in samples of spontaneous speech from the same informants. The descriptive and interpretative apparatus used is the "discourse intonation" model outlined in Brazil (1985a). Comparison focuses on the functional oppositions recognised in this model, realised in the systems of prominence, tone, key and termination. Excluded from the comparison are the phonetic implementation of these categories, such as the typical shape of falling or rising tones, and other non-systemic features. The main findings of the study are that the native and non-native informants generally make the same intonation choices to achieve the same communicative goals. Differences are seen to arise from the non-natives' lack of proficiency in English, their lack of awareness of the role of intonation in social conventions, and the influence of prior teaching. Implications of these findings for teaching intonation are discussed.

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Input variability is vividly present even in L1 acquisition contexts (Foulkes and Docherty 2006), let alone in an FL/ L2 context where learners are exposed to input in one form from fellow students, to a different variety from the local teacher, and possibly another variety from the institutional model which typically represents the “native-standard norm” (Cook 2008; Regan 2013). However, little is currently known about (second) language acquisition in relation to input multiplicity (cf. Siegel 2010). In fact, it is unclear how L2 acquisition models such as the Speech Learning Model (Flege 1995) or Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) cope with input comprising multiple varieties. Against this backdrop, this study set out to investigate the nature of child L2 phonology acquisition under the influence of multiple varieties and its interface with sociolinguistic factors in Hong Kong (HK). The study looks at L2 English phonology acquisition by Hong Kong Cantonese children when various varieties are present. Specifically, it targets youngsters exposed to Filipino-accented English from live-in housekeepers in addition to the school and community input encompassing UK, US, and HK varieties. Results show that the 31 kindergarteners in their third year of studies aged 4;6 to 6, and the 29 first year secondary school students aged 11 to 14 who had received/were still receiving Filipino-accented English significantly outperformed 34 age-matched controls who were not exposed to such input on a picture-choosing task and a sound discrimination AX3 task targeting Filipino English plosives /p,t,k/ and fricatives /f,v/ (plosive onsets are often unaspirated while /f,v/ are sometimes rendered as [p,b] respectively in this variety (Tayao 2008)). These findings confirm predictions made by L2 speech acquisition theories in that the acquisition of L2 phonology is possible given a sufficient amount of exposure to the target language input. iii However, participants did not produce this variety in the production part of the experiment (a picture naming and a pair matching task) despite showing signs of perceptual knowledge. In addition, a separate instrument (verbal-guise technique) tapping into informants’ attitude towards Filipino-accented English reveals ambivalent attitudes towards this variety, making it challenging for one to resort to speech accommodation (Beebe and Giles 1984) or speech design models (Bell 1984; 2001) for an adequate explanation. This study highlights the complexity involved when multiple varieties are present in the acquisition context, which is arguably the norm rather than the exception in this current age of unprecedented geographic, social, and occupational mobility (Chambers 2002). It also reminds us of the importance of scrutinising from several perspectives the nature of input in L2 phonology (Moyer 2011; Piske and Young-Scholten 2009). Without a clear understanding of the diversity present in the input, it is difficult to make any solid claims about learners’ phonological competence in a given target language. In addition, the seemingly conflicting results on the perceptual and production parts of the study underline how essential it is to analyse the acquisition outcome from several perspectives through task triangulation.

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Fundamental frequency (F0) is the most important feature among the components of prosody in a language, tone and intonation languages alike. In a tone language, how lexical tone and sentence intonation can both use F0 as their main acoustic cues has long been an intriguing question. Will the lexical tones be so resistant to modification that no elaborate intonation is possible in the language? How much of the surface sentential F0 is attributable to lexical tones and intonation? If F0 modification is kept minimal, how will prosodic focus be realized? And will the lack of focus-related F0 change be a disadvantage in terms of focus perception? In this dissertation, experimental studies have been made on Cantonese in some less well-understood aspects of its prosody. Firstly, the tonal characteristics of sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Cantonese as a special case of the interaction between tone and intonation are examined. Secondly, the acoustic correlates of prosodic focus in Cantonese are explored. SFPs are a class of words known to have functions similar to intonation. It is not yet clear, however, whether the F0 contours of SFPs are derived purely from lexical tones, purely intonational, or a combination of tone and intonation. As an attempt to offer a solution, a production experiment was designed in which sentences in Hong Kong Cantonese with ten different SFPs were recorded and detailed analyses of their F0 contours, final F0, final F0 velocity and duration were performed. The results show that most of these SFPs are very similar to the lexical tones in terms of F0 contours, but there are significant differences in durations in more than half the cases. In addition, the occurrence of an SFP does not give rise to differences in F0 and duration in the syllables preceding the SFP in most cases. But differences can be seen in sentences with question SFPs, which indicates that the prosody of the SFPs may be partly due to intonational meanings. One of the SFPs, however, exhibits a component F0 contour that seems to be sequentially attached to the end of the lexical tonal component. These findings suggest that Cantonese SFPs have underlying tonal targets just like those of lexical tones, but they also carry intonational meanings by modifying the lexical tonal contours. Previous research has shown that Beijing Mandarin, a tone language, marks focus not only by on-focus prosodic expansion like many other languages, but also by post-focus compression of pitch range and intensity (PFC). However, recently it is found that PFC is absent in Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin, two languages closely related to Beijing Mandarin. This finding both highlights the non-universality of PFC and raises questions about its origin. The present study explores these issues by investigating focus production in Cantonese by native Cantonese speakers born and raised in Hong Kong, and in English and Cantonese by bilingual speakers who were born and raised in Southern England. Results from the Hong Kong speakers show that, just as in Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin, PFC is absent in Cantonese, and mean F0, duration, intensity and excursion size were found to be higher in on-focus words. Results from the bilingual speakers show that their Cantonese also lacks PFC. More remarkably, out of the fifteen bilinguals tested, only one-third show PFC in all their English test sentences. These findings suggest that PFC is hard to transmit across languages through bilingualism. Moreover, the differential prosodic patterns among the bilingual speakers suggest that in the bilingual community, PFC may be subject to gradual loss. Although tone-intonation relationship in SFPs and the acoustic correlates have previously been studied, most of the discussion lacked supporting evidence from phonetic experiments. The present study is distinguished in its systematic experimental design and detailed acoustic analyses, and it is hoped that the results will lay the foundations for future investigations into Cantonese phonetics.

Phonological awareness is a crucial component of reading development and a phonological deficit has been consistently found in poor readers. Studies of the auditory processing abilities of poor readers. however. have found conflicting evidence of deficits for perceiving either fast or slow rates of acoustic change, both of which may act as cues for speech perception. The aim of the present research was to investigate if a difference exists between poor readers' and normal readers' processing of the acoustic cues within speech in PA tasks and if this contributes to poor readers' phonological deficit. The studies presented in this thesis used various methods to modify the speech in phonological awareness tasks. These tasks were administered to groups of poor readers. chronologically age matched controls and reading age matched controls. Slow fluctuations in noise masking of speech in a PA task were found to impair PA performance more so than fast fluctuations in noise masking. although the latter may provide benefits for response speed. Typically developing children were found to be sensitive to the temporal degradation of speech in a PA task when the words were compressed to 50%, while the poor reading children were not. When this was followed longitudinally, the younger controls developed to display the same sensitivity to temporal degradation that the older controls had displayed the previous year. A study of. processing differences between dyslexic adults and normal readers (measured using event related potentials) found that dyslexic adults experience difficulties in processing speech tokens and words during a PA task in addition to their impairment for phonological segmentation .. The findings of the present.studies allowed a model of the development of sensitivity to acoustic cues in speech to be presented in the general discussion. alongside an overview of the evidence for differences in how poor and normal readers may process speech in PA tasks.

Korean nasals /m/ and /n/ are generally considered by Korean phoneticians to be hardly different from the corresponding English sounds, but those in word-initial position are often perceived as plosives by native speakers of English. This had been noted by only a few previous observers, and investigated on a very limited scale. In this study, various experimental methods were employed in systematic analyses of the production and acoustic form of word-initial /m/ and /n/ from fluent connected speech collected from a relatively large number of informants, and corresponding perception tests were conducted with groups of Korean and English listeners. Auditory and spectrographic analyses confirmed that the segments were commonly “denasalized”. They display characteristics widely different from those of sonorant nasals, lacking the nasal formants commonly seen in spectrograms; in most cases they were more similar to voiced plosives, many tokens even showing plosive-like release bursts. Spectral analyses confirmed that denasalized nasals are significantly different from sonorant nasals throughout the whole frequency range but remain somewhat different from voiced plosives in the low and high frequency regions. Aerodynamic and accelerometer studies, which examined the consonants in CV combinations, indicated that the denasalized sounds are evidently produced with a pattern of velopharyngeal control which is different from those of sonorant nasals or of plosives. Perception tests showed overwhelmingly that the word-initial denasalized sounds are categorized as nasals by Korean listeners but as plosives by English listeners. When real voiced plosive tokens from another context are artificially moved to word-initial position, Koreans perceive these too as nasals, while English listeners’ responses are not sensitive to the context. The study shows that denasalization needs to be acknowledged as a major regular feature of spoken Korean, even though it has been largely ignored up to now. Directions for further research are outlined.

Extreme reduction refers to the phenomenon where intervocalic consonants are so severely reduced that two or more adjacent syllables appear to be merged into one. Such severe reduction is often considered a characteristic of natural speech and to be closely related to factors including lexical frequency, information load, social context and speaking style. This thesis takes a novel approach to investigating this phenomenon by testing the time pressure account of phonetic reduction, according to which time pressure is the direct cause of extreme reduction. The investigation was done with data from Taiwan Mandarin, a language where extreme reduction (referred to as contraction) has been reported to frequently occur. Three studies were conducted to test the main hypothesis. In Study 1, native Taiwan Mandarin speakers produced sentences containing nonsense disyllabic words with varying phonetic structures at differing speech rates. Spectral analysis showed that extreme reduction occurred frequently in nonsense words produced under high time pressure. In Study 2a, further examination of formant peak velocity as a function of formant movement amplitude in experimental data suggested that articulatory effort was not decreased during reduction, but in fact likely to be increased. Study 2b examined high frequency words from three spontaneous speech corpora for reduction variations. Results demonstrate that patterns of reduction in high frequency words in spontaneous speech (Study 2b) were similar to those in nonsense words spoken under experimental conditions (Study 2a). Study 3 investigated tonal reduction with varying tonal contexts and found that tonal reduction can also be explained in terms of time pressure. Analysis of F0 trajectories demonstrates that speakers attempt to reach the original underlying tonal targets even in the case of extreme reduction and that there was no weakening of articulatory effort despite the severe reduction. To further test the main hypothesis, two computational modelling experiments were conducted. The first applied the quantitative Target Approximation model (qTA) for tone and intonation and the second applied the Functional Linear Model (FLM). Results showed that severely reduced F0 trajectories in tone dyads can be regenerated to a high accuracy by qTA using generalized canonical tonal targets with only the syllable duration modified. Additionally, it was shown that using FLM and adjusting duration alone can give a fairly good representation of contracted F0 trajectory shapes. In summary, results suggest that target undershoot under time pressure is likely to be the direct mechanism of extreme reduction, and factors that have been commonly associated with reduction in previous research very likely have an impact on duration, which in turn determines the degree of target attainment through the time pressure mechanism.

Amcan yr astudiaeth hon yw archwilio i amrywiadau ffonolegol dwy ardal benodol yng nghanolbarth Cymru, sef cyffiniau Harlech a Bro Dysynni. Yn gyntaf, ceisir gosod y gwaith hwn yng nghyd-destun astudiaethau tafodieithegol a sosioieithyddol a gyflawnwyd eisoes yng Nghymru a thu hwnt. Eir ati wedyn i ddisgrifio systemau ffonolegol y ddwy ardal am y tro cyntaf erioed. Arwain hyn yn naturiol at ganolbwynt yr astudiaeth, sef dadansoddiadau meintiol manwl o bedair nodwedd ffonolegol benodol sy’n gysylltiedig â chanolbarth Cymru. Bydd canlyniadau’r traethawd hwn yn taflu goleuni newydd ar y gwahanol amrywiadau a geir yn y canolbarth, ac ar natur gymhleth ardaloedd trawsnewid. Holir hefyd i ba raddau y mae grwpiau o siaradwyr sy’n ymddangos yn debyg o safbwynt eu cefndir cymdeithasol yn unffurf yn ieithyddol. Bydd canfyddiadau’r astudiaeth hon yn berthnasol i dafodieithegwyr a sosioieithyddion fel ei gilydd.