Volume 52, Issue 2

Verb gapping in Hebrew was studied to determine the extent to which lengthening interacts with word stress and to investigate the distribution of the lengthening effect within the syllable preceding the relevant structural boundary. Seven native speakers of Hebrew read initalstressed and final-stressed bisyllabic key words in verb-gapped constructions and in matching sentences which did not involve deletion. Lengthening in gapping primarily affected the final syllable regardless of stress and also extended back to the initial syllable. The inverse relationship between lengthening of the final syllable and the duration of a following pause, predicted by metrical theory, was not found. Within the final syllable, the vowel showed more lengthening than the final-stop closure, in contrast to the pattern of progressively greater lengthening revealed in studies of utterance-final syllables. These results suggest differences between the implementation of lengthening in gapping and at other structural boundaries.

In recent developments in phonological theory two independent representations for prosodic prominence are needed in languages such as Dutch and English. A nonculminative auto-segmental structure with high and low tones accounts for pitch accents in focused constituents, whereas a culminative metrical structure which is phonetically coded in relative duration accounts for the lexical stress position in a word. The most farreaching consequence following from this proposal is that relative temporal structure of a word does not change if a pitch accent is shifted to an unstressed syllable. Our results show that, if a pitch accent is shifted (through focus manipulation) from the stressed onto the unstressed syllable, rhyme durations are more or less inverted. Therefore, the assumption of completely independent tonal and metrical structure is largely untenable. However, our results also show a small residual effect of the original stress pattern after the accent shift, which can be accounted for by a metrical grid representation.

English monolinguals and native Spanish speakers of English used a 9-point scale to rate syllable-initial stops for goodness as realizations of the English /p/ category. Voice onset time (VOT) was varied in a set of short-duration (‘fast-rate’) consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli, and in a set of longer-duration (‘slow-rate’) CV stimuli. The VOT values ranged from values typical for English /b/ to values which exceeded those typical for English /p/. Results for the native English (NE) subjects replicated those obtained previously using the same two continua. Goodness ratings systematically increased, then decreased as VOT values extended beyond the range typical for English /p/. The NE subjects gave their highest ratings to stimuli with VOT values of about 50 ms. For stops with longer VOT values, their ratings were higher for stimuli in the slow-rate than fast-rate continuum. The native Spanish (NS) subjects were assigned to two subgroups based on degree of foreign accent in their pronunciation of English sentences. Both proficient and nonproficient NS subjects gave their highest ratings to stimuli with much the same VOT values as the NE subjects, even though /p/ is realized with short-lag VOT in Spanish. The nonproficient, but not the proficient NS subjects showed significantly smaller rate effects on goodness ratings than did the NE subjects. However, the subjects in both NS groups gave significantly higher ratings to stimuli with short-lag VOT values than did the NE subjects. The results are discussed in terms of the hypothesis that adult learners of a second language may establish new perceptual phonetic categories for phonetic segments not found in the native language.