Volume 71, Issue 4

The English past tense allomorph following a coronal stop (e.g., /bɑndəd/) includes a vocoid that has traditionally been transcribed as a schwa or as a barred i. Previous evidence has suggested that this entity does not involve a specific articulatory gesture of any kind. Rather, its presence may simply result from temporal coordination of the two temporally adjacent coronal gestures, while the interval between those two gestures remains voiced and is acoustically reminiscent of a schwa. The acoustic and articulatory characteristics of this vocoid are reexamined in this work using real-time MRI with synchronized audio which affords complete midsagittal views of the vocal tract. A novel statistical analysis is developed to address the issue of articulatory targetlessness based on previous models that predict articulatory action from segmental context. Results reinforce the idea that this vocoid is different, both acoustically and articulatorily, than lexical schwa, but its targetless nature is not supported. Data suggest that an articulatory target does exist, especially in the pharynx where it is revealed by the new data acquisition methodology. Moreover, substantial articulatory differences are observed between subjects, which highlights both the difficulty in characterizing this entity previously, and the need for further study with additional subjects.

Previously post-focus compression (PFC) - the lowering of fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity of post-focal words to below those of the same words in identical sentences with neutral focus - was found in Beijing Mandarin but not in Taiwan Southern Min and Taiwan Mandarin. This study investigated whether the presence of PFC would vary with age and language use of societal bilinguals of Southern Min and Mandarin. Three groups of bilingual speakers of Quanzhou Southern Min and Mandarin, age around 20, 40 and 60, were examined for their prosodic realization of focus. All the speakers acquired Southern Min first, followed by Mandarin in childhood, but the younger speakers used more Mandarin than the older speakers. Comparisons of duration, intensity and F0 in focused, prefocus and post-focus words indicated that all groups produced Taiwan-like focus, i.e., without PFC, in Southern Min, but the youngest group produced Beijing-like PFC in Mandarin. These findings reveal that increased language experience, such as greater amount of second language (L2) use, correlates with increased ability to produce native-like PFC in L2, suggesting that PFC can be used as an indicator in assessing L2 speech acquisition.

This article reports an experiment to test whether Japanese and English speakers vary their fundamental frequency (f0) range as a function of the language spoken. Speech samples of Japanese-(American) English simultaneous bilinguals (5 males, 5 females; all undergraduates at UC Berkeley) performing comparable reading tasks in their two native languages were analysed. The study builds on a relatively new approach to measuring f0 range that computes its high and low points from tonal targets in the intonational phonology. Unlike in most previous studies where f0 range is traditionally treated as a one-dimensional measure, f0 range in this study is measured along two quasi-independent dimensions: level and span. Findings revealed statistically significant crosslanguage differences between Japanese and English in both dimensions. This provides new insights into the relation between prosodic structure and f0 range in these two typologically different prosodic systems.