Volume 5, Issue 4

Previous studies suggest that there are special timing relations in syllable onsets. The consonants are assumed to be timed, on the one hand, with the vocalic nucleus and, on the other hand, with each other. These competing timing relations result in the C-center effect . However, the C-center effect has not consistently been found in languages with complex onsets. Moreover, it has occasionally been found in languages disallowing complex onsets. The present study investigates onset timing in German while discussing alternative explanations (not related to bonding) for the timing patterns observed. Six German speakers were recorded via Electromagnetic Articulography. The corpus contained items with four clusters (/sk/, /kv/, /gl/, and /pl/). The clusters occur in word-initial position, word-medial position, and across a word boundary preceding different vowels. The results suggest that segmental properties (i.e., oral-laryngeal coordination, coarticulatory resistance) determine the observed timing patterns, and specifically the absence or presence of the C-center effect.

Geminate voiceless stops /pː tː kː / have been recently found to show optional pre-aspiration under certain circumstances in spontaneous and read Italian speech. This paper investigates the impact of pre-aspiration on the perception and production of contrastive quantity, e.g., fato ‘fate’ vs. fatto ‘done’. It tests the hypothesis that synchronic variability involving pre-aspiration, together with concomitant stop closure shortening, may be setting in motion a sound change in Italian ultimately leading to de-gemination, i.e., /pː tː kː / > [ h p  h t  h k] > /p t k/. The proposed sound change would be perceptually driven (Ohala 1981, 1993) and comes about via listener association of pre-aspiration with the preceding vowel rather than the oral closure. The hypothesis is only partially supported by the experimental results. Perception data show that Italians perceive pre-aspirated stops as shorter than plain stops of analogous overall duration. However, production data show that pre-aspiration in Italian does not in fact involve concomitant oral closure shortening.

Determining the factors involved in the non-native perception of the pitch patterns of tones is complicated by the fact that all languages use pitch to various extents, whether linguistic (e.g., intonation) or non-linguistic (e.g., singing). Moreover, many languages use pitch to distinguish lexical items with varying degrees of functional load and differences in inventory of such pitch patterns. The current study attempts to understand what factors determine accurate naïve (= non-learner) perception of non-native tones, in order to establish the baseline for acquisition of a tonal L2. We examine the perception of Thai tones (i.e., three level tones, two contour tones) by speakers of languages on a spectrum of lexically contrastive pitch usage: Mandarin (lexical tone), Japanese (lexical pitch accent), English (lexical stress), and Korean (no lexically contrastive pitch). Results suggest that the importance of lexically contrastive pitch in the L1 influences non-native tone perception so that not all non-tonal language speakers possess the same level of tonal sensitivity, resulting in a hierarchy of perceptual accuracy. Referencing the Feature Hypothesis (McAllister et al. 2002), we propose the Functional Pitch Hypothesis to model our findings: the degree to which linguistic pitch differentiates lexical items in the L1 shapes the naïve perception of a non-native lexically contrastive pitch system, e.g., tones.