Volume 81, Issue 3

While the general acoustic mechanisms that explain the development of tone in language have been understood since at least Maspero (1912. Étude Sur La Phonétique Historique de La Langue Annamite: Les Initiales. Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 12. 1–126), we are still far from having a predictive theory of tonogenesis. Kurtöp, a Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan shown to be undergoing tonogenesis, provides a rare opportunity to advance our understanding of how and why languages develop lexical tone. This study examines the role that sonority and place of articulation have in the spread of tone from voicing contrasts on preceding consonants in Kurtöp. First, we find that tone is more likely to be produced following fricatives than when following stops. Second, we see that within the stops, tone phonologises more readily following some places of articulation over others. Taken as a whole, this shows us that tone is moving through Kurtöp, following the most sonorous segments first and moving to the least sonorous segments. These findings thus help us refine our theory of tonogenesis and show that functional pressures have strong influences in this particular pathway of sound change.

This study investigates the variation in phrase-final f0 movements found in dyadic unscripted conversations in Papuan Malay, an Eastern Indonesian language. This is done by a novel combination of exploratory and confirmatory classification techniques. In particular, this study investigates the linguistic factors that potentially drive f0 contour variation in phrase-final words produced in a naturalistic interactive dialogue task. To this end, a cluster analysis, manual labelling and random forest analysis are carried out to reveal the main sources of contour variation. These are: taking conversational interaction into account; turn transition, topic continuation, information structure (givenness and contrast), and context-independent properties of words such as word class, syllable structure, voicing and intrinsic f0. Results indicate that contour variation in Papuan Malay, in particular f0 direction and target level, is best explained by turn transitions between speakers, corroborating similar findings for related languages. The applied methods provide opportunities to further lower the threshold of incorporating intonation and prosody in the early stages of language documentation.

The current study explores whether watching subtitled videos could facilitate L1 Chinese-L2 English speakers’ perception of L2 English connected speech. Three hundred ninty seven Chinese college students of L2 English completed a video-based spot dictation task after watching English videos with or without L1/L2 subtitles, featuring various connected speech types (e.g., linking, deletion, and their combinations). Results suggested an overall facilitation effect of watching videos on L2 connected speech perception, which was modulated by proficiency, subtitle form, and the complexity of connected speech. First, subtitled videos were more facilitative than non-subtitled videos in L2 perception. Second, participants with higher L2 proficiency better perceived English connected speech than those with lower proficiency. Third, the more connective devices an item used, the more difficult it was for L2 perception. When this complexity was controlled, the L2 perception was not influenced by connected speech type. Finally, the complexity of connected speech also mediated the subtitle facilitation effects. When the connected speech involved triple connective devices, L2 speakers benefited more from L1 subtitles than L2 subtitles. The findings can provide insights into multi-modal speech perception and English connected speech learning.