Language is a common metaphor used to describe dance and how people understand, observe, dance and relate to dances. This metaphor implies that dance has a communicative aspect between people and there is a structure to the patterns found in the dance. The pattern of interest in language is the pattern of articulation of sounds. The dance investigated in this thesis is the Foxtrot, a partner dance, with a view to examining how the structure of this dance is articulated using theories from oral language phonology and sign language phonology. In particular it looks at sonority and prosodic units in sign language and how they apply to dance. The research questions are: (1) Can sonority be defined for dance and used in the analysis of dance steps, and (2) Can dance steps be organized into prosodic units? This thesis makes the following arguments: Dance has a sonority based on the articulators used to articulate the dance step. The steps are structured around the sonority of the articulators used in the step. In the Foxtrot sonority is defined by the proximity of the articulators to the centre of mass of the dancer. The closer to the centre of mass the more sonorous the movement. The most sonorous movements start the step while following movements are less sonorous. This pattern is repeated with the other prosodic unit of the foot, where the most prominent step starts the foot. The conclusion is that theories from phonology can be applied to the Foxtrot and may be able to be extended to other types of dance. / Graduate

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Le Mbondzi connait de nombreux processus phonologiques. Dans cette thèse nous montrons que certains d’entre eux sont liés à son système d’accord de classes qui joue un rôle important dans la formation des mots, tandis que d’autres résultent de l’assimilation de traits par les segments concernés. Nous montrons aussi que certains processus phonologiques en nourrissent d’autres à l’instar de : la chute historique d’occlusives orales en position C2 de racine qui donne lieu à une longueur vocalique provenant de la juxtaposition de deux noyaux, l’allongement compensatoire qui dépend en partie de la dissimilation consonantique des préfixes ou des morphèmes d’accord et de l’élision à la jonction entre deux mots, les règles tonales qui sont directement liées à la perte d’une more à la suite d’élision ou de formation de glides. Concernant la relation entre tonslexicaux et tons intonationels, notre point de vue est que les derniers se superposent aux premiers. Par ailleurs, nous présentons une étude des relatives, qui ont une construction possessive en Mbondzi. Nous montrons, entre autres, qu’elles sont introduites par des préfixes d’accord de type /CV/ dont le contenu segmental est déterminé par le préfixe nominal du nom précédent et qu’elles diffèrent selon que leur verbe est à l’inaccompli ou non. Enfin, nous étudions les différents types de questions partielles et leur construction, qui impliquent, entre autres, les pronoms interrogatifs "nda" (pour les humains) et "nde" (pour les non humains), des morphèmes d’accords interrogatifs déterminés par le préfixe nominal du sujet (pour les questions partielles sur le sujet) ou de l’objet (pour les questions partielles sur l’objet direct ou indirect), des adverbes pour les questions circonstancielles de manière et, des expressions interrogatives pour les questions partielles temporelles. / Mbondzi is a language involving many phonological processes. In this dissertation we show thatsome of these processes are linked to its system of class agreements which plays an importantrole in words formation while others are related to the feature assimilation of the involvedsegments. We also show that some phonological processes are fed by others such as: the historicaldrop of the oral stops in the C2 position of the root which gives rise to a long vowel resulting fromthe juxtaposition of two short vowels, the compensatory lengthening which depends both upon theconsonantal dissimilation of prefixes or agreement morphemes and upon the elision at wordsjunctures, some tonal rules that are directly related to the loss of a mora after elision or gliding.As far as the relation between lexical and intonational tones is concerned, our assumption is thatintonational tones are superimposed on lexical ones. We also provide a study of relative clauses,characterized by a possessive construction. We show that they are introduced by class agreementmorphemes of /CV/ types which are segmentally determined by the nominal prefix of thepreceding noun, and how they differ depending upon verbal aspects. Finally, we present thedifferent types of Wh-questions constructions which involve various types of morphemes, such as:interrogative Pronouns "nda" (for humans) and "nde" (for non-human), interrogative Morphemesdetermined by the nominal prefix of the subject (for Wh-questions on the subject) or of the object(for Wh-questions on direct object or indirect object), adverbs for How-questions and,interrogative expressions for temporal Wh-questions.

Phonological and morphological awareness are shown to be predictors of hearing and deaf children's literacy achievements in various languages, and Arabic is assumed to be no different. However, this might not be the case for two reasons. Firstly, the linguistic context of the Arab world is characterised by diglossia, i.e. the use of two different varieties of the same language in different settings. Hearing and orally educated deaf children will therefore encounter the vernacular variety of Arabic outside school, but are introduced to literacy in the more prestigious variety of Standard Arabic during instruction in school. Secondly, Arabic orthography has two forms: a fully vowelised script, which is typically taught in the first two years of school, and a non-vowelised script, which is the form of the written language widely used in society. This study specifically aims to investigate whether phonological and morphological awareness are independent predictors of the emergent literacy achievement of hearing and orally educated deaf Kuwaiti children. This is in addition to the question of whether children's awareness of the two language forms, i.e. their dialect awareness, contributes to their literacy achievement and to their levels of phonological and morphological awareness. This investigation was carried out longitudinally through a number of phonological, morphological and dialect awareness measures utilised as predictors of literacy outcome skills of word reading, word spelling, pseudo-word decoding and reading comprehension. Variances of age and general cognitive ability were controlled for throughout all the analyses undertaken. The results for the first target group of hearing children (N = 78, aged 6; 2 years) indicated a significant superiority of phonological awareness as the predominant predictor of all literacy skills across grade levels one and two. Morphological awareness was a predictor of first- graders' spelling ability, and was subsequently implemented to predict all the literacy skills of second-graders. Dialect awareness was a predictor of the word reading and reading comprehension ability only for second-graders, and its mediational effect was revealed when it was seen to significantly reduce the effect of phonological and morphological awareness on second-graders' reading skills after being examined as a control measure. The results for the second target group of orally educated deaf children (N = 34, aged 7; 6 years) indicated that phonological, morphological and dialect awareness were varyingly significant independent predictors of the subjects' literacy skills. A mediational effect of dialect awareness on the predictive link between morphological awareness and word spelling outcome was also evident. Although the prediction association between literacy predictor and outcome measures was mostly consistent and similar across both groups, exceptions in the predictive pattern revealed that the deaf children were at a disadvantage in developing language awareness skills that facilitate efficient mapping of speech into the written form. These findings are discussed in terms of language-general and language-specific properties. The outcomes offered by the current study cannot imply a cause-and-effect association, but allow for constructive identification of literacy predictors and assist in clarifying possible implications for children's literacy capabilities. As the strengths and needs of the examined groups have been clearly recognised, future investigations of causal and mediational analyses will validate the current findings about the Arabic diglossic phenomenon, and additionally specify an appropriate response in terms of practical educational plans.

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Ce travail de thèse a pour objet l’étude des principes gouvernant la coordination par « et » de deux mots en français. Il a pour but d’observer l’émergence de facteurs actifs dans la sélection d’un ordre préférentiel de coordination binaire directe par « et », hors contexte, selon un angle essentiellement phonologique ; et ainsi de tenter d'en proposer une pré-hiérarchisation en français. Il apparaît, en effet, que pour des exemples tels que « Cul et chemise », « Modes et travaux », « Émilie et Nathan », l'ordre adopté ici est l'ordre préférentiel en français, et ceci que l'on se base sur le jugement intuitif des locuteurs, ou qu'on l'atteste au moyen de relevés statistiques. Les locuteurs privilégient souvent spontanément un ordre à un autre dans ce type de formations, le jugeant plus naturel. Partant de ce constat, la question qui se pose est celle de savoir quels sont les facteurs qui régissent l'ordre de ces constituants en français. De nombreuses études se sont intéressées à cette problématique pour d'autres langues, spécifiquement pour l'anglais (Cooper et Ross (1975), Pinker et Birdong (1979), Wright, Hay et Bent (2002, 2005)). Toutes tendent à prouver que de nombreux facteurs phonologiques et extra-phonologiques jouent un rôle important dans le processus de formation de deux mots coordonnés. Néanmoins, à notre connaissance, l'étude des facteurs phonologiques actifs dans la coordination binomiale par « et » en français demeure à ce jour inédite. Nous tenterons de combler cette lacune. Pour ce faire, dans une approche empirique et expérimentale, nous avons rassemblé des données statistiquement valides, à partir desquelles nous avons ensuite dégagé des principes généraux. Puis, nous avons proposé une analyse phonologique dans le cadre d'une approche en terme d'interactions de contraintes inspirée par Plénat [1996,1997] dans laquelle nous appréhendons la sélection d'un ordre binomial préférentiel de coordination par « et » comme le résultat de conflits entre des principes ou des contraintes. / The concerns of this work are : first, to bring out the factors controlling two-word coordinating in French (nouns, adjectivies, tensed verbs and adverbs), second, to demonstrate the existence of active principles in choosing a preferential order to coordinate two nouns with “et”, third, to propose a study of coordinated words permutation, from a mainly phonological point of view. It seems indeed that, in examples such as “Cul et chemise”, “Mode et travaux” or “Emilie et Nathan”, the order displayed is the preferred one in French, either considering native speakers’ intuitive judgement or confirming it by a statistics survey. Speakers often spontaneously prefer an order, judged more natural, over the other in such structures. With this observation in mind, we asked ourselves a question: what are the factors that affect the order of those components in French. Many studies have taken an interest in that issue for other languages and in particular for English (Cooper and Ross (1975), Pinker and Birdong (1979), Wright, Hay and Bent (2002, 2005)). All of them tend to prove that several phonological and extra-phonological factors play an important part in the process of coordinating two words. There is however no study yet, as far as we know, about the phonological factors active in coordinating two words with “et” in French. We’ve this shortcoming. Aiming to that, with an empirical and experimental approach, we gathered statistically valid data, from which we drew general principles. Then, we made a phonological analysis in a constraint interaction framework inspired by Plénat [1996,1997], for which we looked at the “et”-coordinated two-word order preferred choice as the result of a conflict between principles or constraints.

The dichotomy of contrastive and allophonic phonological relationships has a long-standing tradition in phonology, but there is a growing body of research (see Hall, 2013, for a review) that points to phonological relationships that fall between contrastive and allophonic. The criteria most commonly used to define phonological relationships or resolve cases of ambiguous phonological relationships – namely (a) predictability of distribution, and (b) lexical distinction – are not always able to account for observed sound patterns. The main goal of this dissertation is to identify and apply quantitative measures (relative frequency and minimal pair counts) to the traditional criteria in order to better account for cases of intermediate phonological relationships or, in other words, to account for different strengths and degrees of contrast. Twenty native speakers of Laurentian French (LF) participated in Experiment 1, an AX discrimination task, and Experiment 2, a four-interval AX (4IAX) task, which tested the broader relationships of allophony and contrast. It was hypothesized, based on previous experiments (Boomershine et al., 2008; Dupoux et al., 1997; Ettlinger & Johnson, 2009; Johnson & Babel, 2010; Kazanina et al., 2006; Peperkamp et al., 2003; Pruitt et al., 2006), that phones in an allophonic relationship would be more difficult to perceive than phones in a contrastive relationship. Results confirmed previous findings, with longer reaction times for allophonic pairs as compared to contrastive pairs in the AX task (p<.001), as well as in the 4IAX task (p = .004). For Experiments 3, 4 and 5, thirty native speakers of LF participated in an AX, a 4IAX and a similarity rating task. Measures of functional load, frequency and acoustic similarity were applied to pairs of phones in allophonic and phonemic relationships in order to quantify the degree of contrast between pairs. If a gradient view of contrast was supported, it was hypothesized that High Contrast vowels [a-ɔ] would yield higher accuracy, faster reaction times and lower similarity ratings; Low Contrast vowels [y-ʏ] would yield lower accuracy, slower reaction times and higher similarity ratings; and Mid Contrast vowels [o-ʊ] would yield results that fell between the two extremes. If, on the other hand, a strict binary interpretation of contrast was supported, High Contrast vowels and Mid Contrast vowels should yield similar results since these vowels are considered to be in a phonemic relationship, with higher accuracy, faster reaction times and lower similarity ratings, while Low Contrast vowels [y-ʏ], in an allophonic relationship, should yield lower accuracy, slower reaction times and higher similarity ratings. The results from Experiments 3 (AX) and 4 (4IAX) show that the High Contrast pairs yielded significantly higher accuracy scores and faster reaction times than both Mid and Low Contrast pairs (Experiment 3: p<.001 for both High vs. Mid and High vs. Low comparisons; Experiment 4: p = .039 for High vs. Mid, p = .055 for High vs. Low comparisons). However, no significant differences were found between Mid and Low Contrast pairs in these two experiments. The results from Experiment 5 matched gradient predictions, showing significant differences between High, Mid and Low conditions, with similarity being judged highest for Low pairs, lowest for High pairs, and ratings for Mid pairs falling exactly between the other two levels (p<.001 for all comparisons). While results do not perfectly match gradient predictions, the findings provide evidence counter to a strict binary interpretation of contrast since traditionally phonemic pairs (High [a-ɔ] and Mid [o-ʊ]) were significantly different from one another in all experiments. The lack of difference between Mid and Low Contrast pairs could be due to the measures of functional load and frequency for Mid pairs being closer to those of Low pairs, and thus did not reflect a level of contrast that was equidistant between High and Low Contrast. Nevertheless, taken together with the results from Experiment 5, the results appear to support a gradient view of phonological relationships rather than a strictly dichotomous view. Quantitative measures therefore show promise in accounting for cases of intermediate phonological relationships.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the utility of nonlinear phonological frameworks for designing and executing an intervention program with phonologically disordered children. Six such children between the ages of 3 and 6 years participated in the study three times a week over three consecutive six-week blocks. The following general questions were addressed: 1. Will nonlinear phonological frameworks help to predict logical and attainable intervention goals for phonologically disordered children? 2. Are the separate prosodic and segmental levels of representation of nonlinear phonology psychologically real? 3. If the 'prosodic tier' has some observable clinical reality, will there be a difference in proportion and rate of syllable/word shapes acquired as a result of intervention methods that contrast the onset and rime versus those that utilize the mora a constituent? 4. If the 'segmental/melodic tier' has some observable independence, is there any advantage to be gained from targeting specified features at 'higher' versus lower' levels in the feature hierarchy in phonemic inventory intervention? An alternating block, mulitiple baseline design (counterbalanced over six single subjects) provided an opportunity to investigate the above questions. Within each six-week block, three week periods were devoted in turn to prosodic (syllable structure) training and segmental training. Prosodic subblocks were divided into two four-session sunblocks to contrast developmental change for targets presented as moraic constituents versus onset-rime constituents. Segmental periods were divided into two four-session subblocks to contrast developmental change for features from higher and lower levels in the feature hierarchy. Analyses during and after the study demonstrated the following with respect to the four research questions: 1. The nonlinear frameworks provided a logical model for deriving attainable intervention goals. All of the children became intelligible by the end of the project as a result of attaining the goals determined by nonlinear phonological theory. 2. Rate of attainment of syllabic and segmental goals differed, with a faster rate of change for syllabic goals overall, suggesting independence of segmental and prosodic tiers, and possible dominance of the prosodic tier. Interactions between tiers were also observed, suggesting that they are interdependent as well as autonomous. 3. Moraic and onset-rime condition quantitative results were virtually equivalent, but some qualitative differences appeared which had relevance for the each of the theories with respect to status of the onset, word-final consonants, and epenthesis. 4. Higher level features in the feature hierarchy tended to be acquired before lower level features. The nonlinear phonological frameworks stimulated a successful intervention study. Evidence gained through this study in turn contributes to the understanding of the nonlinear constructs. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate the nature of an optional consonant deletion process, through an articulatory and acoustic study of word-final consonant clusters in Persian. Persian word-final coronal stops are optionally deleted when they are preceded by obstruents or the homorganic nasal /n/. For example, the final clusters in the words /næft/ “oil”, /suχt/ “burnt” and /qæsd/ “intention” are optionally simplified in fast/casual speech, resulting in: [næf], [suχ], and [qæs]. What is not clear from this traditional description is whether the coronal stop is truly deleted, or if a coronal gesture is produced, but not heard, because it is obscured by the adjacent consonants. According to Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990a, 1990b, 1992, 2001), the articulatory gestures of the deleted segments can still exist even if the segments are not heard. In this dissertation, ultrasound imaging was used to determine whether coronal consonant deletion in Persian is categorical or gradient, and the acoustic consequences of cluster simplification were investigated through duration and spectral measures. This phonetic study enables an account for the optional nature of the cluster simplification process. A general phonological account is provided for the simplification of coda clusters with rising sonority, and the acoustic and articulatory investigation focuses on the simplification of clusters with coronal stops. Ten Persian-speaking graduate students from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, five male and five female, aged 25-38 participated in the articulatory and acoustic study. Audio and real time ultrasound video recordings were made while subjects had a guided conversation with a native speaker of Persian. 662 tokens of word-final coronal clusters were auditorily classified into unsimplified and simplified according to whether they contained an audible [t]. Singleton coda consonants and singleton /t/s were also captured as controls. The end of the constriction plateau of C1 and beginning of constriction plateau of C3 were used to define a time interval in which to measure the coronal gesture as the vertical distance between the tongue blade and the palate. Smoothing Splines ANOVA was used in a novel way to compare tongue blade height over time across the three conditions. The articulatory results of this study showed that the gestures of the deleted segments are often still present. More specifically, the findings showed that of the clusters that sounded simplified, some truly had no [t] gesture, some had gestural overlap, and some had reduced gestures. In order to explain the optional nature of the simplification process, it is argued that the simplified tokens are the result of two independent mechanisms. Inevitable mechanical and physiological effects generate gesturally reduced and overlapped tokens whereas planned language-specific behaviors driven by phonological rules or abstract cognitive representations result in no [t]-gesture output. The findings of this study support the main arguments presented in Articulatory Phonology regarding the underlying reasons for sound patterns and sound change. The results of this study are further used to examine different sound change models. It is argued that the simplified tokens with totally deleted [t] gesture could be the result of speakers changing their representations based on other people’s gestural overlap. This would be instances of the Choice and Chance categories in Blevins’ (2004) CCC sound change model. The acoustic results did not find any major cues which could distinguish simplified tokens from controls. It is argued that articulatory data should form an integral part of phonetic studies.