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Title: The phonology and phonetics of Rugao syllable contraction : vowel selection and deletion
Creator: Xu, Chenchen
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: In Chinese languages, when two syllables merge into one that has the segments from both, the segments compete to survive in the limited time slots (Chung, 1996, 1997; Lin, 2007). The survival or deletion of segment(s) follows a series of rules, including the Edge-In Effect (Yip, 1988) and vowel selection (R.-F. Chung, 1996, 1997; Hsu, 2003), which decide on the outer edge segments and vowel nucleus, respectively. This dissertation is dedicated to investigating the phonological patterns and...
Show moreIn Chinese languages, when two syllables merge into one that has the segments from both, the segments compete to survive in the limited time slots (Chung, 1996, 1997; Lin, 2007). The survival or deletion of segment(s) follows a series of rules, including the Edge-In Effect (Yip, 1988) and vowel selection (R.-F. Chung, 1996, 1997; Hsu, 2003), which decide on the outer edge segments and vowel nucleus, respectively. This dissertation is dedicated to investigating the phonological patterns and phonetic details of syllable contraction in Rugao, a dialect of Jianghuai Mandarin, with more focus on the vowel selection and deletion process. First, I explored the segment selecting mechanism, including the preservation or deletion of the consonantal and vocalic segments, respectively. Based on the phonological analyses, I further investigated two major questions: 1) what determines the winner of the two vowel candidates for the limited nucleus slot in the fully contracted syllable, the linearity of the vowels (R.-F. Chung, 1996, 1997) or the sonority of the vowels (Hsu, 2003), and 2) is a fully contracted syllable phonetically and/or phonologically neutralized to a non-contracted lexical syllable with seemingly identical segments with regards to syllable constituents, lengths, and vowel quality?The corpus data suggest that, 1) the Edge-In Effect (Yip, 1988) is prevalent in Rugao syllable contraction in deciding the survival of the leftmost and rightmost segments in the pre-contraction form whether they are vocalic or not, unless the phonotactics of the language overwrite it. 2) In fully contracted syllables, the winner of the two vowel candidates is contingent upon the sonority of the vowels as well as the phonotactics of the language. Following such patterns, a forced choice experiment focused on the selection of the vowel nucleus that controlled the syllable structure and used nonce words confirmed the influence of sonority in the vowel competition and ruled out the factor of relative linear order of the vowels. Generally, the vowel of higher sonority is more likely to survive than the competitor of lower sonority ranking, assuming a vowel sonority hierarchy based on height and centrality. The surviving vowels in the contracted syllable were then further examined with production experiments and acoustic measurements. The results suggest that the deletion of the losing vowel is in fact incomplete, and manifested in two ways, 1) the contracted vowel is longer than the lexical vowel in general, although the ratio of vowel in the duration of the syllable may or may not be different, 2) the contracted vowel has different F1 and/or F2 values than its lexical counterpart, suggesting the vowel quality has altered in the contracted syllable. The phonologically defined process is shown to be phonetically quite complex, suggesting that the lexical distinction is maintained in some ways even though the two words seem neutralized.
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Title: Effect of multimodal training on the perception and production of French nasal vowels by American English learners of French
Creator: Inceoglu, Solene
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Face-to-face interaction often involves the simultaneous perception of the speaker's voice and facial cues (e.g., lip movements) making speech perception a multimodal experience (Rosenblum, 2005). Research in second language (L2) speech perception suggests that participants benefit from visual information (Hazan, Sennema, Iba, & Faulkner, 2005; Wang, Behne, & Jiang, 2008) and that perception training can transfer to improvement in production (Iverson, Pinet, & Evans, 2011) and can be...
Show moreFace-to-face interaction often involves the simultaneous perception of the speaker's voice and facial cues (e.g., lip movements) making speech perception a multimodal experience (Rosenblum, 2005). Research in second language (L2) speech perception suggests that participants benefit from visual information (Hazan, Sennema, Iba, & Faulkner, 2005; Wang, Behne, & Jiang, 2008) and that perception training can transfer to improvement in production (Iverson, Pinet, & Evans, 2011) and can be generalizable to novel stimuli (Hardison, 2003). Most studies so far have investigated consonants and, despite a couple of studies looking at the multimodal perception of vowels (Hirata & Kelly, 2010; Soto-Faraco et al., 2007), little is known about the effect of multimodal training on the acquisition of vowels. More specifically, no study has looked at the contribution of visual cues in the perception and production of L2 French.The aim of this study is to provide a better understanding of the role of facial cues by examining the effect of training on the perception and production of French nasal vowels by American learners of French. The following research questions guide this study: 1) Does Audio-Visual (AV) perceptual training lead to greater improvement in perception of nasal vowels than Audio-Only (A-only) training does? 2) Does AV perceptual training lead to greater improvement in production of nasal vowels than A-only training does? 3) Does perception accuracy vary in relation to consonantal context? 4) Is training generalizable to novel stimuli?Sixty intermediate American learners of French were randomly assigned to one of the following training groups: AV, A, and control. All participants completed a production pretest and posttest, and a perception pretest, posttest and generalization test. The perception tests (monosyllabic words with various consonantal contexts) were presented within three modalities and with two counterbalanced orders: AV, A, V or A, AV, V. During the three weeks between the pretest and posttests, the AV and A groups received six sessions of perception training.The results of the perception task showed that, contrary to the control group, both the A-only and AV groups improved significantly from the pretest to the posttest, but that the differences between the AV and A-only groups were not statistically significant. When comparing each vowel in each of the three modalities, there was however a trend in favor of the AV training group. The analysis of the consonantal context revealed that, for both training groups, accurate perception of the vowel was higher when the initial consonant was a velar (occlusive non labial) and was lower with palatals (fricative labial). Training was also shown to be generalizable to new stimuli with novel consonantal contexts. In addition, although both groups improved at the production posttest, the oral production of the AV training group improved significantly more than the production of the A-only training group did, suggesting that AV perceptual training (i.e., seeing facial gestures) leads to greater improvement in pronunciation.
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Title: Local identity and language attitude in standardization : evidence from Tianjin Chinese tone sandhi
Creator: Wang, Xiaomei (Graduate of Michigan State University)
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation investigates the roles of local identity, language attitude, social awareness, as well as social meanings in dialect change by examining Tianjin Chinese tone sandhi in apparent time. It studies the process by which local variants become stigmatized and also the process by which local features increase. Tianjin Chinese is in the process of standardization (Gao & Lu, 2003; Gu & Liu, 2003), but the current study finds that only stigmatized local features are disappearing, while...
Show moreThis dissertation investigates the roles of local identity, language attitude, social awareness, as well as social meanings in dialect change by examining Tianjin Chinese tone sandhi in apparent time. It studies the process by which local variants become stigmatized and also the process by which local features increase. Tianjin Chinese is in the process of standardization (Gao & Lu, 2003; Gu & Liu, 2003), but the current study finds that only stigmatized local features are disappearing, while an unmarked local feature seems to be immune to standardization. I interpret this in line with Labov's (1972) study of Martha's Vineyard, whereby traditional local features may come to index resistance to standardization and to the incursion of new people into the speech community. Ninety sociolinguistic interviews, including a word list, were conducted in Tianjin in the local dialect in 2014-16 (48f, age 18-82). Participants were categorized as 'middle class' or 'working class' using a combined measure of occupation, education and income. Qualitative assessments of 'positive' or 'negative' were assigned to speakers' attitudes to Tianjin and to migrants. The variables of the dissertation are three of the four traditional Tianjin tone sandhi, referred to as (53-53), (53-21) and (21-21) after their input tonal values respectively. Application of the (53-53) and (53-21) variables produce local outputs; non-application makes a speaker sound more like a Standard Chinese speaker. The old output variant of (21-21) is traditional; the new variant is closer to Standard Chinese. 7462 tokens of (53-53), 5683 tokens of (53-21), and 4117 tokens of (21-21) were extracted from the interviews and word lists (N = 17262). Tokens were impressionistically coded for the application or non-application of (53-53) and (53-21), and for the new or old variant of (21-21), and a subsample were checked in Praat. (53-53) application and the old variant of (21-21) have decreased substantially in frequency over time, probably because their outputs include or are similar to the most salient Tianjin low tone: Tone 1 (Han 1993). Mixed effects regression shows that they are avoided in word list style, by the middle class, by women, and by people with a negative attitude to Tianjin.In contrast, (53-21) has increased from 73.5% among speakers aged 65+, to 93% among speakers under 65. I speculate that because (53-21) is below public awareness, with little style-shifting, it is available for 'recycling' (Dubois & Horvath 2000) as a positive marker of 'new' Tianjin identity. Tianjin natives may be linguistically contrasting themselves with the many migrants who have moved to the city in the last three decades, and indeed a negative attitude to migrants significantly increases the likelihood of (53-21) application in the regress.The reduction or elimination of prominent stereotyped dialect features has been observed in languages with large numbers of speakers, often because of migration and language contacts (Hinskens, 1998). Unmarked dialect features have been observed to persist or increase to keep local identity (Labov 1972, Dubois & Horvath 2000). These two conflicting forces might lead to a stable compromise dialect (Hinskens, 1998). Here the case study of Tianjin Chinese tone sandhi also exhibits signs of changing to a compromise dialect, with stereotyped local features disappearing and unmarked local features increasing, adding to the expanding number of non-Western case studies of language change (Stanford & Preston, 2009) that support earlier generalizations made from Western communities.
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Title: The impact of internal social change on local phonology
Creator: Nesbitt, Monica
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation addresses a fundamental question about phonology, i.e. how do we account for the appearance of a phonological rule in a community that had previously never posited one? For example, how could we account for someone who posits a phonological difference between /r/ and /l/, i.e. the two are distinct phonemes in their grammar, when no one in their speech community distinguishes between the two sounds phonologically, i.e. [r] and [l] are simply variants of the same phoneme. The...
Show moreThis dissertation addresses a fundamental question about phonology, i.e. how do we account for the appearance of a phonological rule in a community that had previously never posited one? For example, how could we account for someone who posits a phonological difference between /r/ and /l/, i.e. the two are distinct phonemes in their grammar, when no one in their speech community distinguishes between the two sounds phonologically, i.e. [r] and [l] are simply variants of the same phoneme. The general argument in the literature is that phonological change comes about via re-analysis of some phonetic exaggeration (e.g. Hyman 1975; Ohala 1990; Pierrehumbert 2001; Bermudez-Otero 2007), but because phonological change is rarely observed, there is a paucity of empirical evidence using production data in a community while a change is underway to support this theory. Recent acoustic analyses of large databases of naturally occurring, ongoing phonological changes show that the role of phonetic variation is minor and in some cases non-existent when a phonological rule is innovated (Fruehwald 2013; 2016; Berkson, Davis & Strickler 2017). Therefore, the available empirical evidence for phonological change stands in contrast to what has been proposed in the theoretical literature.This dissertation intervenes in the debate through the analysis of a database of naturally occurring speech in Lansing, Michigan where allophonic change is currently underway. In Lansing, /ae/ is being re-organized such that at the turn of the 20th century, speakers in the community did not distinguish between /ae/ in any phonological environments, speakers born in the 1990s, however, do distinguish between pre-nasal and pre-oral /ae/. I utilize a combination of analyses in this dissertation to account for the initiation and spread of this change throughout the community. First, I conducted an acoustic analysis of /ae/ in F1/F2 space in a corpus of naturally occurring speech by 36 Lansing natives. In particular, I tracked changes in vowel height (F1 at nucleus), backness (F2 at nucleus), diphthongal quality (difference in F1 and F2 at nucleus and offset), and relative distributions of pre-nasal and pre-oral /ae/ token clouds for each speaker (Pillai-Bartlett statistic - see Hay, Warren & Drager 2006; Hall-Lew 2010). I supplemented the acoustic analysis with a sub-phonemic judgement task administered to 107 Lansing natives via an online survey. During the task, respondents were asked to identify whether the vowels in words like pat and pan are the same.This dissertation finds that phonological change was gradual in Lansing. The measure of speaker-level distributions with an impressionistic investigation of divergent trajectories, and the results of the sub-phonemic judgement task suggest that there is indeed an intermediate period between no distinction and phonological difference in Lansing whereby the difference between pre-nasal and pre-oral /ae/ was only phonetically implemented. An analysis of the effects of gender and social class on these measures finds that phonetic variation is socially conditioned in Lansing, such that white-collar women are leading the change away from the community norm. I observe that phonetic exaggeration was promoted by social re-organization in the community, which eventually lead to the development and spread of an allophonic rule. In line with the prediction of Baker, Archangeli, and Mielke (2011), I find that the chance alignment of social and phonetic variability in 20th century Lansing accounts for the initiation and spread of this phonological change.
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Title: You have to learn to adapt : a sociolinguistic study of Chinese Americans in the "Asian city" of southeast Michigan
Creator: Zheng, Mingzhe
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTYOU HAVE TO LEARN TO ADAPT: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF CHINESE AMERICANS IN THE "ASIAN CITY" OF SOUTHEAST MICHIGANByMingzhe ZhengThis dissertation explores the nature of dialect contact, ethnic identity construction by examining the extent to which the speech of second generation Chinese Americans (henceforth CAs), born and raised in Troy, Michigan, is affected by two local sound changes: the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), the dominant dialect among mainstream Michiganders of European...
Show moreABSTRACTYOU HAVE TO LEARN TO ADAPT: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF CHINESE AMERICANS IN THE "ASIAN CITY" OF SOUTHEAST MICHIGANByMingzhe ZhengThis dissertation explores the nature of dialect contact, ethnic identity construction by examining the extent to which the speech of second generation Chinese Americans (henceforth CAs), born and raised in Troy, Michigan, is affected by two local sound changes: the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), the dominant dialect among mainstream Michiganders of European American descent (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006); and an emerging sound change in Michigan, the Elsewhere Shift (Kendall & Fridland, 2014). The community investigated in this dissertation, Troy, is in southeast Michigan. It is distinguished by its large population of Chinese Americans and a long residence history of Chinese immigrants compared to other Asian groups (Metzger and Booza 2001). Referred to locally as “the Asian city of southeast Michigan”, 19% of Troy residents are Asian and 5% self-identify as being of Chinese descent. Job opportunities in the auto industry, a high-quality education system, and a safe environment have been attracting an increasing number of Chinese immigrants to this area from the 1960s and continuing to the present day.The acoustic and statistical analysis was carried out on the vowel system of 30 college-age Chinese American speakers, and 15 comparable European Americans serve as a reference group. Data collection was conducted by two interviewers: a male graduate student from China, and a European American undergraduate female student who was also from southeast Michigan. The data in this study were collected by a structured interview similar to a sociolinguistic interview. The analyses show that Troy Chinese Americans are participating in the local vowel system to the same degree as their European American cohort. Nonetheless, even though the two ethnic groups share similar social evaluation of those vowels, as indicated by the examination of contextual style-shifting, inter-ethnic differences were nonetheless found for the vowels THOUGHT, DRESS, STRUT, TRAP and TOO. Of these vowels, only TOO was sensitive to a change of interlocutor: Participants’ nucleus of TOO was on average significantly backer with the male Chinese interviewer than with the female European American interviewer. I argue that inter-ethnic variation in the realization of TOO was found to be due to an effect of interlocutor identity, the F2 dimension of TOO is used by Chinese Americans as a way to index ethnic identity, solidarity, and localness in Troy, Michigan.This study draws on research in variationist sociolinguistics. It joins a growing body of work within variationist sociolinguistics that investigates Asian American speakers in the U.S. (e.g., Hall-Lew 2009, Wong 2015, Bauman 2016). The purpose of this work is to contribute to our knowledge of the complex interactions between language, ethnicity identity and regional identity construction. In the variationist literature, there are a limited number of studies focusing on stylistic variation that signals response to interlocutor ethnicity (e.g., Rickford and McNair-Knox 1994 for African American English). This study serves as the first step towards investigating the stylistic variation of CAs’ English – grounded in the variationist approach to ethnic minority English in the U.S. – and to enrich our understanding of intra-speaker and inter-speaker stylistic variation.
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Title: Consonantal effects on F0 in tonal languages
Creator: Luo, Qian (College teacher)
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Consonant types can influence F0 values of the adjacent vowels (this F0 perturbation effect is henceforth referred as C-F0). C-F0 may be enlarged to maximize perceptual distinctiveness and thus reinforce aspiration contrast. In tonal languages, the effect may also be inhibited to cue tone contrast by constraining F0 variability by the demands of the lexical tone system. This dissertation investigates how C-F0 can be related to tone contrast and aspiration contrast by asking the following...
Show moreConsonant types can influence F0 values of the adjacent vowels (this F0 perturbation effect is henceforth referred as C-F0). C-F0 may be enlarged to maximize perceptual distinctiveness and thus reinforce aspiration contrast. In tonal languages, the effect may also be inhibited to cue tone contrast by constraining F0 variability by the demands of the lexical tone system. This dissertation investigates how C-F0 can be related to tone contrast and aspiration contrast by asking the following questions:(1) Is C-F0 conditioned by lexical tones? (2) Is C-F0 conditioned by F0 difference between tones? (3) Is there a cue trading relation between F0 and VOT for aspiration contrast?Fifteen Mandarin speakers and fifteen Cantonese speakers participated in the production experiments. All stimuli followed a CV template. The Mandarin stimuli had four Mandarin tones: M-T1(55), M-T2(35), M-T3(214) and M-T4(51). The Cantonese stimuli covered six Cantonese tones: C-T1(55), C-T2(25), C-T3(33), C-T4(21), C-T5(23) and C-T6(22). Initial consonants were aspirated obstruents, unaspirated obstruents and sonorants. F0 values following sonorants were the baseline for evaluating C-F0. The major results are as follow: for Question 1, the major findings are that tones can influence the vowel duration that C-F0 can extend and the difference between F0 following different consonants in Mandarin and Cantonese. A consistent direction was found: F0 following aspirated stops was higher than F0 following unaspirated stops and following sonorants. The trajectory of F0 following aspirated stops started as the second highest and converged with the lowest baseline F0 following sonorants. The results indicate a robust aspiration raising and a weaker voiceless unaspirated raising effect in both Mandarin and Cantonese.For Question 2, the pattern of the vowel duration that C-F0 can extend was found to follow the pattern of the F0 difference between the target tone and its closest tone in the tone inventory. However, the difference between F0 following different consonants within the first 10ms did not follow the patterns of F0 difference between tones in Mandarin or Cantonese. Finally, the cross-linguistic comparison provides support to the hypothesis that higher degree of tone competition may restrict C-F0.For Question 3, the results show that VOT is a strong cue for the aspiration contrast while onset F0 is a weak cue. However, the findings do not provide evidence for a cue trading relation between VOT and onset F0 in Mandarin or Cantonese. This dissertation has offered a new angle that few previous studies have dealt with before: traditionally, the enhancement of voicing contrast or the physical properties of producing voicing were proposed as the major trigger that give rise to C-F0. This dissertation has introduced a new contrast, i.e. the contrast of lexical tones, to explore the question. Furthermore, the major findings for all three questions confirm a hybrid account for explaining C-F0 in tonal languages: the tone enhancement account and the consonant automatic account.
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Title: Speech processing of Hai-lu Hakka falling tones and tone sandhi
Creator: Yeh, Chia-Hsin
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation investigates speech processing of Hai-lu Hakka falling tones (high, low) and tone sandhi (low-rising, high-checked) by focusing on how variations influence the perception of the contrast of falling tones and the application of tone sandhi. Some recent studies (Bent 2005; Huang 2004; Wang 1995; Zhang & Lai 2010; Zhang et al 2011) indicated that tonal contrasts may not be as distinctive as assumed previously and that tone sandhi may not be fully productive, since earlier...
Show moreThis dissertation investigates speech processing of Hai-lu Hakka falling tones (high, low) and tone sandhi (low-rising, high-checked) by focusing on how variations influence the perception of the contrast of falling tones and the application of tone sandhi. Some recent studies (Bent 2005; Huang 2004; Wang 1995; Zhang & Lai 2010; Zhang et al 2011) indicated that tonal contrasts may not be as distinctive as assumed previously and that tone sandhi may not be fully productive, since earlier studies tended to neglect the role variations play in tonal processing. In addition, the target language Hai-lu Hakka has been understudied, and was found to undergo language attrition in recent decades (Yeh 2011; Yeh & Lu 2013; Yeh & Lin 2015). The dissertation hopes to clarify how tonal variations affect tonal contrasts and tone sandhi application by explicating Hai-lu Hakka’ tonal processing. The first experiment examines 30 Hai-lu Hakka speakers’ contrast of falling tones by tonal identification and lexical recognition tasks. These tasks require participants to identify monosyllabic stimuli’s tonal categories (either high-falling or low-falling) and to recognize their lexical meanings (either a high-falling word [ti53] ‘to know’ or a low-falling word [ti31] ‘emperor’). The second experiment examines 31 Hai-lu Hakka speakers’ processing of two sandhi rules by tonal discrimination, tonal identification, lexical recognition, and production tasks. These tasks require participants to discriminate underlying and sandhi tones, to identify their tonal categories, to recognize their corresponding meanings, and to produce tone sandhi in disyllabic compounds. The results show that (i) various lexical and phonetic/phonological factors play a role in the tonal contrast and the sandhi processes, (ii) lexical and phonetic/phonological effects can be more or less significant in different tasks, and (iii) lexical factors exhibit a more consistent pattern across different tasks than phonetic/phonological factors. These findings indicate three general implications as follows. First, the lexical and phonetic/phonological effects indicate that the contrast of two falling tones varies with both lexical and phonetic/phonological factors, so does the application of two sandhi rules. These factors may result in tonal confusion between two falling tones and lower application rates of two sandhi rules. Second, the lexical and phonetic/phonological effects indicate that variations occur frequently and extensively across different tasks in the two experiments, which calls into question those derivational theoretical models that assume a transition from variations to invariance during speech processing. Third, the results indicate that lexical effects exhibit a more consistent pattern than phonetic/phonological effects, since phonetic/phonological effects exhibit an asymmetry between perception and production patterns. These findings suggest a more crucial role of lexical influences in tonal processing, which hence favors a lexically-based model for speech processing in general. To sum up, this dissertation has three general contributions. First, relating phonetic modifications/processes to variations and phonological modifications/processes to invariance is called into questions. Second, the findings uncover specific issues such as tonal confusion and a perception-production asymmetry in Hai-lu Hakka’s tonal phonetics and phonology, supporting the crucial need to carefully examine a less-studied language like Hai-lu Hakka. Third, the findings indicate a more crucial role of lexical influences in tonal processing, suggesting that an exemplar-based processing model that argues for a non-derivational and lexically-driven account is a more reasonable approach to speech processing.
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Title: L'humour : definition, fonctions et applications
Creator: Pimbert, Jessica
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Humor has been under study for years, centuries even. So much time as passed and so many people have tried to understand its purpose and its mechanisms that, in order to study comedies in future works we needed to find out what were the functions and apparatus of humor that most authors would agree on, although we weren't able to look at all that has been produced on the subject. The two main theories on which we focused our study were Henri Bergson's through his book Le rire which he wrote...
Show moreHumor has been under study for years, centuries even. So much time as passed and so many people have tried to understand its purpose and its mechanisms that, in order to study comedies in future works we needed to find out what were the functions and apparatus of humor that most authors would agree on, although we weren't able to look at all that has been produced on the subject. The two main theories on which we focused our study were Henri Bergson's through his book Le rire which he wrote as early as 1900 and the theories of humor which have been offered by Viktor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo in the 1980's and 2000's. By mixing a theory based on comedies and a theory based on semantics and pragmatics, the social factor of humor, either as a mark of communion or not with society or a way to deal with somebody's own feelings in society, as well as its need for duality, conflict and shifting nature were made obvious to us.
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Title: Markedness in the perception of L2 English consonant clusters
Creator: AlMahmoud, Mahmoud S.
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The central goal of this dissertation is to explore the relative perceptibility of vowel epenthesis in English onset clusters by second language learners whose native language is averse to onset clusters. The dissertation examines how audible vowel epenthesis in different onset clusters is, whether this perceptibility varies from one cluster to another, whether an auditory bias toward anaptyxis vs. prothesis, and vice versa, in the perception of vowel epenthesis location exists, and the...
Show moreThe central goal of this dissertation is to explore the relative perceptibility of vowel epenthesis in English onset clusters by second language learners whose native language is averse to onset clusters. The dissertation examines how audible vowel epenthesis in different onset clusters is, whether this perceptibility varies from one cluster to another, whether an auditory bias toward anaptyxis vs. prothesis, and vice versa, in the perception of vowel epenthesis location exists, and the extent to which each of these inquiries depend on cluster type as a factor. The dissertation reports on four experiments. Experiment 1 explores Saudi Arabian (SA) listeners' perception of vowel epenthesis in tautosyllabic English onset clusters. The findings suggest that SA listeners are sensitive to the type of cluster in question when perceiving vowel epenthesis, and a hierarchy of perceptual difficulty among different onset clusters is motivated empirically as well as phonetically. Experiment 2 investigates the relationship between vowel length and non-native listeners' ability to perceive vowel epenthesis in different onset clusters. It evaluates listeners' aural sensitivity to the epenthetic vowel along a 5-step duration continuum. Results indicate that duration of the epenthetic vowel as well as type of cluster have a significant effect on listeners' ability to discriminate stimuli correctly. The interaction between duration and cluster type is hardly significant, however. Experiment 3 tests the hypothesis that the choice between perceptual anaptyxis and prothesis is cluster-determined by having listeners discriminate clusters from their anaptyctic and prothetic forms. Results, however, provide partial evidence for this claim. Experiment 4 tests the perceptual hierarchy of difficulty of Experiment 1 in production. The findings suggest that, like perception, L2 learners produce onset clusters variably as a function of cluster type, suggesting a strong link between L2 perception and production of English consonant clusters. The formal analysis of the data draws on principles of the Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) and P-map (Steriade 2009) in accounting for SA learners' vowel epenthesis perceptual patterns in onset clusters. Perceptual distinctiveness scales that reflect relative perceptibility of vowel epenthesis and its location asymmetry in onset clusters are projected into context-sensitive faithfulness constraints. It is argued that the ranking of the markedness constraint *COMPLEXOns relative to DEP-V/A+B, and ONSET relative to DEP-V/A_B capture zero-epenthesis and anaptyxis-prothesis asymmetries, respectively.
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Title: The role of phonology and phonetics in the adaptation of English words into standard Chinese
Creator: Shih, Li-jen
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "We can distinguish three approaches in the literature as to how borrowed foreign words are adapted to comply with the host language sound system: the purely perceptual approach, which claims that the adaptation occurs during perception beyond the listeners' conscious awareness, the purely phonological approach, which claims that the underlying representations of the source words are the input to the adaptation and mapped in the host language lexicon to the structurally closest native...
Show more"We can distinguish three approaches in the literature as to how borrowed foreign words are adapted to comply with the host language sound system: the purely perceptual approach, which claims that the adaptation occurs during perception beyond the listeners' conscious awareness, the purely phonological approach, which claims that the underlying representations of the source words are the input to the adaptation and mapped in the host language lexicon to the structurally closest native representations, and the hybrid approach, which claims that the adaptation occurs in the host language production grammar and that the host language production grammar makes direct reference to the phonetic information in the source words. This dissertation evaluates English loanwords in Standard Chinese (SC) against these three approaches, and the results generally support the hybrid approach. While the hybrid approach is supported, it falls short of explaining some of the loanword data. Two problems are pointed out and the solutions are proposed."--Page ii. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).
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Title: Personality, gender, and the Northern Cities Shift
Creator: Johnson, Steve Leonard
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Studies of sound changes in sociolinguistics have shown a consistent trend that women tend to be linguistically innovative and lead most of the major sound changes. Additionally, women have been shown to use more standard variants than men in stable sociolinguistic variables, giving rise to the "gender paradox" where women are both linguistically conservative and innovative. Studies that examine variation within sex groups unravel this paradox by showing that different women behave...
Show moreStudies of sound changes in sociolinguistics have shown a consistent trend that women tend to be linguistically innovative and lead most of the major sound changes. Additionally, women have been shown to use more standard variants than men in stable sociolinguistic variables, giving rise to the "gender paradox" where women are both linguistically conservative and innovative. Studies that examine variation within sex groups unravel this paradox by showing that different women behave differently-- some being conservative language users while others are innovative. Traditional methods that aim to examine the role of gender in ongoing sociolinguistic change often use sex as a binary variable instead of socially defined degrees of masculinity and femininity. These methods group all women, innovative and conservative, into one sex-based group, and the distinction between those who lead the change and lag behind is lost. Additionally, qualitative studies of leaders of linguistic change have shown similarities in leaders, but there are no quantitative methods to predict leaders of change.This dissertation goes beyond traditional studies of gender variation to create a quantitative methodology to examine leaders in linguistic changes and explain gender- based patterns of linguistic behavior. A representative set of vowel tokens from speakers from Southeastern Michigan was measured and normalized for each subject, and these data were used in multiple regression analyses to identify how speakers pattern in respect to the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), a female-led sound change in the vowel system of speakers from urban Great Lakes areas, and possible factors affecting changes. The main factors studied are self-evaluations on 60 personality traits from Bem's Sex Role inventory, which consists of feminine, masculine, and gender-neutral traits. From the feminine and masculine traits, gender indexes are created to explore gender further and the role of sexual orientation is also examined as a factor.Results indicate that regardless of sex, the more strongly individuals self-identify as "cheerful," the more advanced speakers are in this sound change. Results also show that we can look at the intersection of traits in order to predict the leaders of linguistic change. In general, self-ratings on personality traits that have been traditionally valued as ideal qualities for women to possess are the traits that most positively correlate with further advancement in this sound change. The study also indicates that there are differences between men and women in which traits are indexed socially by the sound change, which emphasizes the importance of looking within sex groups for studies that examine gender as a sociolinguistic variable. This study shows how a more subtle use of labels and traits within the framework of social psychology of language can help shed light on the role of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in ongoing linguistic change.
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