Volume 81, Issue 1

We investigate how three adult groups – experienced L2 English listeners; experienced D2 (second dialect) listeners; and native L1/D1 listeners – categorise Australian English (AusE) lax front vowels /ɪ e æ/ in /hVt/, /hVl/ and /mVl/ environments in a forced-choice categorisation task of synthesised continua. In study 1, AusE listeners show predictable categorisations, with an effect of coarticulation raising the vowel in perception for nasal onset stimuli, and a following lateral lowering the vowel in perception. In study 2, Irish (D2) and Chinese listeners (L2) have different categorisations than AusE listeners, likely guided by their D1/L1. Coarticulation influences the D1/D2 groups in similar ways, but results in more difficulty and less agreement for the Chinese. We also investigate the role of extralinguistic factors. For the Chinese listeners, higher proficiency in English does not correlate with more Australian-like categorisation behaviour. However, having fewer Chinese in their social network results in more Australian-like categorisation for some stimuli. These findings lend partial support to the role of experience and exposure in L2/D2 contexts, whereby categorisation is likely still driven by native categories, with increased exposure leading to better mapping, but not to a restructuring of underlying phonetic categories.

This is an acoustic and articulatory study of the two rhotic schwas in Southwestern Mandarin (SWM), i.e., the er -suffix (a functional morpheme) and the rhotic schwa phoneme. Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) and ultrasound results from 10 speakers show that the two rhotic schwas were both produced exclusively with the bunching of the tongue body. No retroflex versions of the two rhotic schwas were found, nor was retraction of the tongue root into the pharynx observed. On the other hand, the er -suffix and the rhotic schwa, though homophonous, significantly differ in certain types of acoustic and articulatory measurements. In particular, more pronounced lip protrusion is involved in the production of the rhotic schwa phoneme than in the er -suffix. It is equally remarkable that contrast preservation is not an issue because the two rhotic schwas are in complementary distribution. Taken together, the present results suggest that while morphologically-induced phonetic variation can be observed in articulation, gestural economy may act to constrain articulatory variability, resulting in the absence of retroflex tongue variants in the two rhotic schwas, the only two remaining r-colored sounds in SWM.

Referents with a topical or focused status have been shown to be preferable antecedents in real-time resolution of pronouns. However, it remains unclear regarding whether topicality and focus compete for prominence when co-present in the same narrative, and if so, how differential prominence affects prosodic realization of a subsequent pronoun. Building upon the general understanding that stress on pronouns signals an unusual, less accessible interpretation, we take advantage of the conditional bi-clausal construction in conjunction with homophonic 3rd person pronouns in Chinese. We manipulated the information status of two referents that were introduced into a six-clause narrative in succession, specifically (i) Topic and (ii) Focus, and also (iii) the Reference of the Pronoun (either the first or second referent). Our acoustic analyses showed that pronouns were produced with higher F0s when the first referent was topicalized than when it was not topicalized under conditions where the second referent was focused. Pronouns referring back to the first referent were uttered longer when the referent was not topicalized than when it was topicalized. These results suggest accessibility statuses of referents vary dynamically in response to different prominence-lending cues, and these variations can be captured by the prosodic features of a following pronoun.