Volume 77, Issue 6

Phonological regularities in a given language can be described as a set of formal rules applied to logical expressions (e.g., the value of a distinctive feature) or alternatively as distributional properties emerging from the phonetic substance. An indirect way to assess how phonology is represented in a speaker’s mind consists in testing how phonological regularities are transferred to non-words. This is the objective of this study, focusing on Coratino, a dialect from southern Italy spoken in the Apulia region. In Coratino, a complex process of vowel reduction operates, transforming the /i e ɛ u o ɔ a/ system for stressed vowels into a system with a smaller number of vowels for unstressed configurations, characterized by four major properties: (1) all word-initial vowels are maintained, even unstressed; (2) /a/ is never reduced, even unstressed; (3) unstressed vowels /i e ɛ u o ɔ/ are protected against reduction when they are adjacent to a consonant that shares articulation (labiality and velarity for /u o ɔ/ and palatality for /i e ɛ/); (4) when they are reduced, high vowels are reduced to /ɨ/ and mid vowels to /ə/. A production experiment was carried out on 19 speakers of Coratino to test whether these properties were displayed with non-words. The production data display a complex pattern which seems to imply both explicit/formal rules and distributional properties transferred statistically to non-words. Furthermore, the speakers appear to vary considerably in how they perform this task. Altogether, this suggests that both formal rules and distributional principles contribute to the encoding of Coratino phonology in the speaker’s mind.

The present article describes an extended replication of a reading study by Sereno and Jongman (1995) that reported acoustic differences between noun and verb pronunciations of English disyllabic, non-stress-shifting homophone pairs, for example, answer (v) versus answer (n). The original findings point to a gradual influence of the typical stress patterns of both grammatical categories, with noun readings exhibiting a tendency toward trochaic and verb readings toward iambic pronunciation. However, the effects found by Sereno and Jongman (1995) did not consistently reach statistical significance and were based on a very small sample size. Employing a considerably larger group of speakers, the current replication fails to find the reported effects of the grammatical category. The null result obtained can be accounted for within speech production models that assume identical metrical templates for the homophone pairs tested and no direct influence of the grammatical category on the phonetics of stress assignment.

Background/Aims: Previous research has shown that exposure to multiple foreign accents facilitates adaptation to an untrained novel accent. One explanation is that L2 speech varies systematically such that there are commonalities in the productions of nonnative speakers, regardless of their language background. Methods: A systematic acoustic comparison was conducted between 3 native English speakers and 6 nonnative accents. Voice onset time, unstressed vowel duration, and formant values of stressed and unstressed vowels were analyzed, comparing each nonnative accent to the native English talkers. A subsequent perception experiment tests what effect training on regionally accented voices has on the participant’s comprehension of nonnative accented speech to investigate the importance of within-speaker variation on attunement and generalization. Results: Data for each measure show substantial variability across speakers, reflecting phonetic transfer from individual L1s, as well as substantial inconsistency and variability in pronunciation, rather than commonalities in their productions. Training on native English varieties did not improve participants’ accuracy in understanding nonnative speech. Conclusion: These findings are more consistent with a hypothesis of accent attune­ment wherein listeners track general patterns of nonnative speech rather than relying on overlapping acoustic signals between speakers.