No description available.

La présente thèse questionne, sur le fondement des hypothèses de l’interface directe (Scheer 2011, Lowenstamm 1999, Guerssel&Lowenstamm 1990) et du minimalisme non lexicaliste (Halle&Marantz 1993), l’importance de l’information suprasegmentale (Leben 1973) en morphologie. Elle croise, pour ce faire, la phénoménologie de début de mot en bamun (Niger-Congo, EasternGrassfields Bantu, Nun) (Hyman&Voorhoeve 1980), une langue à classes nominales parlée au Cameroun, et la relation d’accord entre affixes de classes nominales et racine.Un fil conducteur, la nasalité, permet de remonter le cours de la dérivation des formes nominales du bamun construites à partir d’une racine postulée a-catégorielle (Acquaviva 2009) et de têtes fonctionnelles (Marantz 1997). Au travers de la sélection allophonique des segments en C1 et de la sélection allomorphique du préfixe nominal, on voit que son mode d’ancrage sur le palier métrique via un pied iambique (Hayes 1985) et la façon dont elle investit la position forte (Ségéral & Scheer 2001) du palier squelettal, déterminent la configuration du gabarit nominal en bamun. Ce qui fait du syncrétisme genre-nombre-diminutif observé dans ces formes nominales plus une conséquence de la dissimilation segmentale, à l’origine de la nature tonale du pluriel morphologique, que le résultat d’une opération d’appauvrissement (Bonet 1991) qui effacerait totalement l’information du genre. Celle-ci peut ne pas être exprimée, et est alors marquée par un diminutif à lecture référentielle, phonétiquement réalisée sur l’unité CV-initiale, posée comme existante et jamais licenciée dans une langue pourtant à groupe consonantique exclusivement de type Sonorant-Obstruante comme se révèle être le bamun. / The following thesis investigates, built on the direct interface hypothesis (Scheer 2011, Lowenstamm 1999, Guerssel & Lowenstamm 1990) and the non-lexicalist minimalist view of the grammar (Halle & Marantz 1993), the importance of suprasegmental information (Leben 1973) in morphology. It crosses, for this purpose, the phenomenology of the left margin of nouns in Bamum (Niger-Congo, Bantu Grassfields, EasternGrassfields Bantu, Nun) (Hyman & Voorhoeve 1980), a noun class language spoken in Cameroon, and the agreement relationship between noun class affixes and the root.Nasality, a peculiar feature in the language, is used to trace the course of the derivation of Bamum nouns constructed from a postulated a-categorial root (Acquaviva 2009) and functional heads (Marantz 1997). Through the allophonic selection of segments in C1 and the allomorphic selection of the nominal prefix, we see that its mode of anchoring on the metrical tier via an iambic foot (Hayes 1985) and the way it invests the strong position (Ségéral & Scheer 2001) on the skeletal tier, determine the configuration of the bamum nominal template. Thus, the observed gender-number-diminutive syncretism in these nominal forms is more a consequence of a segmental dissimilation, at the origin of the tonal nature of the morphological plural, than the result of an operation of impoverishment (Bonet 1991) which will completely delete the information of gender. When not expressed, gender is marked by a diminutive morpheme with referential reading, which occupies the initial CV site, proven existing and never licensed in Bamum, a not so hypothetical language of exclusively Nasal-Obstruent initial clusters.

This study was part of the Portland Language Development Project, a longitudinal study of early expressive language delay. Its purpose was twofold. The first was to examine phonological and reading abilities in second grade children with a history of language delay. The second purpose was to examine the relationship between phonological processing abi1ities and reading skills in these children. Second grade children were assigned to one of three groups, based on their history and current Development Sentence Score (DSS) score: (a) normal language (NL), those with more than 50 words at 20-34 months and above the tenth percentile on the DSS; (b) history of delay, but currently normal expressive language (HX), those with fewer than 50 words at 20-34 months and above the tenth percentile on the DSS; and (c) history of delay with continued performance below normal (ELD), those with fewer than 50 words at 20-34 months and below the tenth percentile on the DSS. The children were evaluated by means of the Reading Recognition and Reading Comprehension subtests of the Peabody Individual Achievement Test (Dunn & Mackwardt, 1970), three complex phonological production tasks, and the Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC) (Lindamood & Lindamood, 1979), which assesses phonological awareness. This study compared the reading and phonologica1 scores of the three groups to determine if there are any significant differences. The results showed no significant differences in reading abilities. There were significant differences on the complex phonological task of naming pictures, between the NL and HX group, and there were significant differences on the LAC, between the NL group and the ELD group, and between the HX group and the ELD group. Reading and phonological scores of the children with a history of late talking were correlated, using a regression analysis to determine whether reading recognition and reading comprehension could be predicted from the phonological production and LAC tasks. The LAC was the only variable that correlated with the Reading Recognition or Reading Comprehension subtests. The LAC accounted for 39% of variance of the Reading Recognition score, and 27% of the variance of the Reading Comprehension score.

This paper looks at the relationship between emotion and vowel length in spontaneous speech, specifically during narratives. It is hypothesized that during emotionally-laden speech, vowel length will be longer in duration than when in non-emotional speech. Data is drawn from the Univerisity of California, Santa Barbara linguistic corpus, with conversations focused on individuals in and around Southern California. The paper builds on work by Dabbs et al., Banse & Scherer, Estes & Adelman, and others regarding the nature of cognitive monitoring, as well as stance as discussed by Ochs & Schieffelin, Ochs, Kärkkainen, Local & Walker, and how emotion is displayed in speech. Tokens chosen for analysis are /ɑ/, /ɑɪ/, and /ə/. Three of each token in first syllable position is collected for analysis from both emotional and non-emotional speech. Analysis of tokens then takes place by (mean) averaging each token's length for each speaker in each stance, then the total vowel average time is calculated again for each speaker in each stance. Beyond intra-vowel, intra-speaker averages, inter-speaker average is calculated to assess consistency of the vowel length changes between stances. The paper finds that the length of tokens shows an average increase during intraspeaker emotional speech.

Research into the eventual suppression of phonological processes among children has centered on the influence of phonetic context and semantic-syntactic factors. Researchers have described various factors that would account for the variability found in normal and speech-delayed children's use of phonological processes. Researchers have found associations between phonological process use and language form and content, although there is a paucity of information pertaining the effect of language use on phonological performances. This study examined the phonological process use within two pragmatic functions-assertiveand responsive utterances-used by 15 normally developing and 15 speech-delayed 3-year-olds. These groups were matched for age, sex, and socioeconomic status, all passed a hearing screening at 25 dB and scored at least 85 on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development or the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. A 10-minute parent/child speech sample of each 3-year-old was orthographically and phonetically transcribed. Each first occurrence utterance was coded as either assertive or responsive, depending on the particular. pragmatic function it served. Percentage of phonological process use was determined for both groups within each pragmatic category, after analysis in the Pepper Program. Data were analyzed for significant differences between the two groups in the percentage of phonological processes used within the assertive and responsive categories. Results indicated that the speech-delayed group used more processes in both categories, although pragmatic function of the utterances did not have a significant effect on percentage of phonological processes used by either group. It was noted that children in the speech-delayed group were only mildly delayed, thus making them fairly intelligible to their listeners. Both groups were more assertive than responsive and used longer utterances during assertive speech acts; however, neither factor appeared to have any bearing on their phonological performances. It was concluded that the two groups appeared to show no significant difference in their phonological performances when comparing one pragmatic category to the other. Results indicated that the assertive speech acts examined held no motivation factors that influence the phonological performance of normal or mildly speech-delayed 3-year-old when compared to responsive speech acts.

While there is general agreement among researchers in the field of language and learning disabilities upon the language hypothesis for reading failure, little research has been explored concerning the relationship between the phonological production skills of preschool children and the same children's prereading abilities in kindergarten. This study examined two aspects of phonological skill (a) the relationship of early phonological production errors and later success on phonological awareness and general prereading skill, and (b) determining if prereading deficits in a group of children with a history of lanquage delay reside specifically in the phonological awareness items or the prereading score in general. The subjects used for this study included 29 "normal" talkers and 30 "late talkers", as determined by the Language Development survey (Rescorla, 1989) when the subjects were between 20-34 months. When the subjects were three years old, a language sample was obtained and later phonemically transcribed from audio tape and entered into the PEPPER computer program to compute the percentage consonants correct (PCC) for each child. The subjects were later evaluated during their kindergarten year for reading readiness, using the Developmental Skills Checklist. This study found that Late Talkers have significantly lower PCCs than there normal talking peers at age three, but their PCCs do not predict their prereading or phonological awareness skills at kindergarten. Phonological awareness was further investigated in terms of supraseqmental and segmental levels of phonological awareness, there was no significant difference between the groups on either level of phonological awareness. However, there was a nonsignificant trend (p

Linguistic diversification within our public schools has demanded professional responsibility from speech-language pathologists (SLPs) serving nonstandard English speaking students. Understanding and recognizing normal cultural linguistic differences is the responsibility of the SLP. This study focused on the relationship of three speech features to intelligibility ratings of 10 preschool aged Black English speakers as assigned by 4 licensed standard English speaking SLPs with varying experience. The SLPs also rated the perceived effect of these speech features (i.e., articulation, speaking rate, and resonance) on intelligibility. Using the Pearson product-moment correlation, ratings were correlated and found to demonstrate an association between intelligibility ratings and all three speech features assessed. To determine which speech feature affected intelligibility the most, a linear association using a stepwise regression was applied to all listeners' ratings. For 3 of the 4 listeners, the strongest association between intelligibility and articulation. Ratings of the 4th listener, the listener with the most experience(> 3 years) demonstrated the strong association between intelligibility and resonance. The listener with _the least amount of experience tended to assign higher severity ratings to ratings for intelligibility, rate, and resonance than did the other listeners. Findings from this study demonstrate a need for more studies within the area of Black English as well as further investigative studies to assess listeners' perception of dialectical differences based on the experience within linguistically different or similar communities. Various measures of intelligibility of Black English speakers should also be explored for more accurate assessment tools for this population. Clinical implications focus on the SLP's responsibility to be experienced and knowledgeable of the linguistic community they are serving.

The goal of this dissertation is to examine the ubiquitous challenge that adult second language speakers have in producing functional morphology, even at advanced stages of acquisition. Specifically, this study examines how native speakers of Spanish, Mandarin and Japanese use past tense and number morphology in English. To this aim, two current competing hypotheses are tested: the Interpretability Hypothesis, which states that certain aspects of syntactic knowledge (uninterpretable features) cannot be acquired after a critical period, resulting in target-deviant use of functional morphology, and the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, which claims that all aspects of syntax can be acquired, but that phonological transfer effects from the first language might be at the source of target-deviant use of functional morphology. Participants were selected according to a pre-established set of criteria in order to obtain similar linguistic profiles. Native speakers of American English also participated as controls. The experiments included proficiency tests, sentence completion tests and picture description tests. Group and individual results were analyzed in order to determine the extent to which the Interpretability Hypothesis and the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis could account for the observed patterns. The results of the experiments in this study strongly suggest that phonological factors can account for some of the observed target-deviant use of functional morphology, supporting the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis. The results also suggest that ultimate acquisition of new uninterpretable features is possible, supporting the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis and not the Interpretability Hypothesis. The study also stresses the idea that although phonological transfer effects cannot account for all the problems observed in second language functional morphology, it is vital that phonological factors be taken into account.

Spelling ability is not static; rather, as children age, learning how to encode morphophonologically complex words in conventional ways is motivated by the increasingly complex demands imposed by academic experiences with morphologically complex words. Success requires ongoing integration of phonological (P), orthographic (O) and morphological (M) knowledge. However, current research on the development and assessment of spelling has not sufficiently accounted for the way word features and participant characteristics interact with students' POM knowledge in the spelling of derived words. This study used a linear mixed effects regression approach to provide new insights about how both word characteristics and students' linguistic knowledge affected the application of POM from grades 3-7 in the spelling of derived forms. Spelling data (WIAT-II) were taken from a larger longitudinal study focused on reading development (Garcia et. al., 2010). Eleven words from the WIAT-II with derivational morphology (which included one inflected form with a derived homophone possibility) were analyzed first with the Phonological Orthographic Morphological Analysis of Spelling (POMAS; an unconstrained scoring system) in order to identify linguistic feature errors within misspellings. Next, misspellings were quantified with the POMplexity metric to evaluate the individual and combined influences of phonology (P), orthography (O), and morphology (M) to derivational misspellings over time. A linear mixed effects regression approach evaluated the impact of item-level characteristics (derivational frequency and shifts), participant characteristics (rime, spelling choice and morphological awareness task scores), and time (grade level) on POMplexity scores. Results indicated item-level characteristics, participant characteristics and time significantly predicted variation in P, O, M, and total POMplexity scores. Frequency had a significant impact on scores, with high frequency words resulting in lower POMplexity scores than low frequency words and these effects were most obvious in grades 3 and 4. Slope differences between words suggested that low frequency misspellings resolve more rapidly than high frequency words. Derivational shift was shown to have a significant interaction with time for O, M and Total scores, but not P scores. In all cases, the slopes for derived words with no shift improved more quickly than shift categories. Finally, performance on measures on the measures of linguistic skill correlated to improved scores for the related POMplexity code. These results strongly suggest that the developmental course of learning to spell derivations is not a linear accumulation of POM knowledge, but instead is a recursive process with both general and word-specific knowledge affecting how an individual student produces a derivational spelling at any given point in time. Contributions of word characteristics, such as frequency and number/type of derivational shift, suggest that morphemic features challenge encoding; that is, increased complexity taxes the system's ability to represent both sound and meaning orthographically. Educational and clinical implications will be described.

This study analyzes the use of linguistic stereotypes in two fantasy role-playing games, Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt and Dragon Age: Origins with a focus on phonology. It investigates how accent stereotypes are used and why they are important for characters in video games, for example regarding prestige and attractiveness. It analyzes each character from a character type perspective: hero, villain, comic-relief, mentor and lover. The results show that there are accent stereotypes in fantasy role-playing games and that they are, most likely, deliberately placed as such. It also shows that standard variations of English are mainly used for characters that serves a purpose to the story while non-standard variations are used for characters that serves no purpose to the game other than working as tools to enrich the world with a sense of life.