This dissertation is an acoustic description of the phonemic inventory of Nez Perce [nez], a Penutian language of the United States. Acoustic work has been conducted on the consonants of Nez Perce, but no acoustic work has been conducted on the vowels or vowel harmony system. This work begins with an overview of the dissertation, language situation, and previous research. Following the introduction are chapters on ejectives and plain obstruents, plain and glottalized sonorants, vowels, vowel harmony, and the conclusion. Nez Perce has both plain and ejective stop series, a plain and ejective affricate series, and a plain fricative series. I examine these segments for acoustic correlates comparing them to previous research, other languages and current theory. The ejectives are described with f0, intensity, jitter, burst amplitude and VOT. I discuss fricatives in terms of spectra, duration, formant transitions, and moments. The timing and realization of glottalization on glottalized and plain sonorants is investigated. Segments are measured for duration and are visually and aurally inspected for variation of glottalization, realized using pitch, laryngealization, glottal stops, or a combination of these features. It is nearly always realized on the sonorant rather than before or after. Vowels are plotted and compared to previous phonological descriptions. The inventory is /i, æ, a, o, u/ rather than the canonical five-vowel system, leading to the description of the inventory as having a “gap” and not maximally contrastive. I suggest that if Nez Perce vowels are considered using a shifted axis then the vowels are maximally contrastive. The non-canonical vowel inventory leads to two seeming unrelated vowel harmony sets: dominant, /i, a, o/, and recessive, /i, æ, u/. The proposed shifted axis view becomes important for reanalyzing the vowel harmony to reconcile these unusual sets. Previous analyses have described Nez Perce vowel harmony as based on advanced tongue root (ATR). I investigated Nez Perce vowels for ATR acoustic correlates; however, the results provide evidence both supporting and not supporting an ATR analysis. I propose an alternate analysis for the vowel harmony based on the principle of maximal contrast, evidenced by the shifted axis model.

Univ., Diss.--Kiel, 2006. / Literaturverz. S. [387] - 403. - CD-ROM-Beil. enth.: Anhänge A - J, teilw. mit Audiodateien (wav-Format).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Psychology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-222).

This dissertation provides experimental evidence for the validity of an intonational phonology. The widely used Autosegmental-Metrical theory con- tends that the phonological structure of intonation can be expressed with two tonal targets (L/H tones and derivatives) and retrieved from its phonetic im- plementations. However, it has not been specifically demonstrated so far in a systematic way. This dissertation argues that this view on intonational phonol- ogy considers the phonetic forms of intonation as instances of phonologically structured intonational units forming functionally discrete categories (tones and derivatives). The model of Pattern Recognition for Intonation (PRInt) applies the concepts of categorization (vagueness, prototype, degrees of typicality) to in- tonation in order to abstract the phonological structure of intonational cate- gories from the ranking, by degree of typicality, of their variations in phonetic implementation. First, instances belonging to an intonation category are collected. Sec- ond, a pattern recognition module, relying on the 4-layer structure protocol, extracts a feature vector from the phonetic data of each instance: a sequence of structurally organized tones (L/H tones and derivatives). Third, a fuzzy classifier, using two functions (frequency and similar- ity), organizes the data from the feature vectors of all instances by degree of typicality (grade of membership of values in multisets) and generates the phonological structure of the intonation category, the prototypical pattern, ex- tracted from all instances, and that subsumes them all. It also re-creates the phonetic implementations of the phonological structure but with their features ranked by degree of typicality. This allows the model to distinguish phono- logically distinct structures from phonetic variations of the same phonological structure. The model successfully extracted the phonological intonation structure associated to three modalities of closed questions in French: neutral, doubt- ful, and surprised. It found that neutral and doubtful closed questions are phonologically distinct while surprise is a phonetic allocontour of the neutral modality, in line with prior characterizations of these patterns. It demon- strated that a bi-tonal phonological structure of intonation can be retrieved from phonetic variations. A versatile modeling tool, PRInt will be developed to use its acquired knowledge to evaluate the categorical status of novel instances and to extract multiple phonological units from mixed corpora. / text

This dissertation examines the production, perception and processing of the Catalan-specific mid-vowel categories (/e/-/[open-mid front unrounded vowel]/ and /o/-/[open-mid back rounded vowel]/) by early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). The analyses focus on the lexical as well as the segmental levels to analyze cognate effects in the production and lexical representations of these early bilinguals, and they explore how their production and perception abilities are related. This study provides evidence that early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca maintain two independent phonetic categories in the Catalan mid-vowel space. The first significant finding is that production patterns in Majorca differ from those previously reported in Barcelona, as the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts are not merging into a single Spanish-like mid-vowel for either Catalan-dominants or Spanish-dominants. Additionally, these bilinguals are not 'deaf' to the Catalan-specific mid-vowel contrasts: both language dominance groups perceive the contrast between the Catalan mid-vowel categories despite the overlap with one phonetic category in Spanish. Even though Spanish-dominant bilinguals as a whole are indistinguishable from Catalan-dominant bilinguals in the perception and production tasks, they are found to have a higher error rate in the lexical decision task. The comparison of the acoustic properties of the target vowels in Catalan cognate and non-cognate experimental items reveals that the production of the mid-vowels is affected by cognate status, and that these cognate effects are also found in the word recognition of aurally presented stimuli. Finally, bilinguals who produced the mid-vowels with a smaller Euclidean distance are more likely than bilinguals who maintain a more robust contrast in their productions to have a higher error rate in the AXB discrimination and lexical decision tasks. The present study contributes to the discussion regarding the organization of early bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant phonetic systems, and implications are considered for cross-linguistic models of bilingual speech production and perception. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections that can account for the interactions between the phonetic and lexical levels of early bilingual individuals. / text

Foreign accent can be everything from hardly detectable to rendering the second language speech unintelligible. It is assumed that certain aspects of a specific target language contribute more to making the foreign accented speech intelligible and listener friendly, than others. The present thesis examines a teaching strategy for Swedish pronunciation in second language education. The teaching strategy “Basic prosody” or BP, gives priority to temporal aspects of Swedish prosody, which means the temporal phonological contrasts word stress and quantity, as well as the durational realizations of these contrasts. BP does not prescribe any specific tonal realizations. This standpoint is based on the great regional variety in realization and distribution of Swedish word accents. The teaching strategy consists virtually of three directives: · Stress the proper word in the sentence. · Stress proper syllables in stressed words and make them longer. · Lengthen the proper segment – vowel or subsequent consonant – in the stressed syllable. These directives reflect the view that all phonological length is stress-induced, and that vowel length and consonant length are equally important as learning goals. BP is examined in the light of existing findings in the field of second language pronunciation and with respect to the phonetic correlates of Swedish stress and quantity. Five studies examine the relation between segment durations and the categorization made by native Swedish listeners. The results indicate that the postvocalic consonant duration contributes to quantity categorization as well as giving the proper duration to stressed syllables. Furthermore, native Swedish speakers are shown to apply the complementary /V: C/ - /VC:/ pattern also when speaking English and German, by lengthening postvocalic consonants. The correctness of the priority is not directly addressed but important aspects of BP are supported by earlier findings as well as the results from the present studies. / <p>För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se</p>

published_or_final_version / abstract / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

La presente tesis tiene por objetivo identificar para la enseñanza del español una serie de características prosódicas que son comunicativamente importantes. El trabajo también se propone poner de relieve el papel central de la prosodia en la comunicación, así como la necesidad de incorporar esta destreza en las competencias comunicativas de la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras. La tesis integra una colección de cinco estudios, tres de los cuales realizados con un enfoque empírico experimental y dedicados a los temas siguientes: (a) las diferencias en la realización de prominencia prosódica por parte de hablantes de español L2 y español L1 (Estudio I), (b) la transferencia de estrategias pragmáticas del sueco L1 al español L2, manifestada en la realización de los tonos de frontera ascendentes (Estudio II), y (c) la contribución de rasgos prosódicos al acento extranjero percibido en hablantes suecos de español L2 con especial atención al rol desempeñado por los tonos de frontera ascendentes y sus correspondientes valores pragmáticos (Estudio III). El objetivo de estos tres estudios es, por un lado, identificar cuáles son las características prosódicas más importantes para conseguir una interacción exitosa en la L2 y, por el otro, investigar en qué medida estas características han sido adquiridas por los aprendientes investigados. Estudio IV resalta que, a pesar del enfoque comunicativo en la enseñanza LE, se abordan los aspectos suprasegmentales en el currículo sueco así como en los cinco libros de enseñanza E/LE analizados como una competencia aislada que no está integrada en la competencia comunicativa. El Estudio V, al combinar los resultados de los Estudios I-III con los de otros estudios temáticamente relevantes, busca identificar unas características principales, unos Core Prosodic Features, para la enseñanza de la prosodia española a los aprendientes suecos. El estudio recomienda un enfoque basado en la atención a la forma para la enseñanza de estas características en contextos interaccionales. / This thesis sets out to identify a series of communicatively important prosodic features for the teaching of Spanish in a Swedish context. The present work also aims to highlight both the central role played by prosody in communication and the need for this skill to be integrated in the communicative competences of second language teaching and learning. The thesis comprises a collection of five studies, three of which use an experimental approach to investigate the following: (a) differences in the realization of prosodic prominence by L2 and L1 speakers of Spanish (Study I); (b) the transfer of pragmatic strategies from L1 Swedish to L2 Spanish, manifested in the realization of rising boundary tones (Study II); and (c) the contribution of the type of L2 prosody displayed by Swedish learners to a percieved foreign accent, focusing, focusing especially on the role played by rising boundary tones and their pragmatic values  (Study III). These initial studies describe some of the main prosodic characteristics of the L2 product as compared to Spanish L1, and identify prosodic features of Spanish L1 that are of importance to acquire for interactional success in the L2. Study IV highlights the fact that, despite the emphasis on a communicative approach in L2 teaching, the approach to the teaching of prosody in the Swedish curriculum and the L2 Spanish text books studied tends to be addressed as a separate skill, that is not integrated in the descriptions of the communicative competences. Study V, by combining the results of Studies I-III with those of other thematically relevant studies, proposes some main features, so-called Core Prosodic Features (CPFs), for the teaching of Spanish prosody to Swedish learners. The identification of the CPFs also enables a future evaluation of the form-focused teaching approach suggested.