This study examines the production of the te reo Māori opening vowel sequences /ia/ /ea/ /oa/ and /ua/, which have been described as hiatuses. We re-examine this classification through acoustic phonetic analysis, using data from three generations of speakers in the MAONZE corpus. We propose a novel bottom-up approach which reveals that the opening sequences are not uniformly hiatus-like as described. Rather, there are structured patterns of variation among duration, formant and intensity trajectories, which form a clear continuum of variation between hiatus- and diphthong-like realisations. All generations of speakers show structured variation in their production of the sequences. We also find that there are word position and morpheme boundary effects on the production of the sequences, and that there is evidence that they have become decoupled from the monophthongs over time. These findings have several implications for how the phonology of Māori is described. The paper also makes a broader methodological contribution,as the methods used do not require presupposing categories like 'hiatus' and `diphthong'. Instead, they allow us to examine patterns of variation between trajectories (formants, intensity) and other measures like duration, without pre-supposing what kind of variation is present in the data.
A key function of focus is to highlight what is said in relation to what could be said, or alternatives to the focus. This plays a crucial role in conveying implied meaning in discourse. Psycholinguistic research has established that focus-marking has processing effects consistent with this contrastive focus function in a range of languages, including drawing attention to contrastive referents, priming alternatives and suppressing non-alternatives in lexical activation, and strengthening memory for mentioned alternatives. These studies have used primary focus markers for the language, largely contrastive prosodic prominence. However, research has shown that an astonishing range of factors can signal focus, including phonological prominence, syntactic construction and word order, grammatical role, verb semantics and the presence of gesture, as well as fine phonetic detail at the segmental, suprasegmental and multimodal levels. Weighting of these cues differs between languages, speakers and with the discourse context. I review my own group’s and related research on focus processing and cues to focus across languages from the perspective of the listener. I offer a view of how these might link, based on focus as an attentional tool, drawing attention to intended focus alternatives, based on probabilistic expectations about prominence.
The glottal stop is a speech sound with varying functions. It can occur as a phoneme in its own right, as a marker of prosodic boundaries, as a replacement of oral stops, and as the replacement for lexical pitch accents. These unusual properties often provide possibilities for deriving predictions that differentiate conflicting theoretical accounts at the core of Laboratory Phonology. Here, I review work based on this premise, with a focus on the effects of glottal stops on lexical access in Maltese and German. The counterintuitive conclusion is that the glottal stop is surprisingly similar to a full phoneme in German (where most assume it is not a phoneme) but a surprisingly "weak" phoneme (in terms of lexical access) in Maltese, where it is a phoneme. This suggests that the glottal stop always is a weak phoneme and the threshold to consider it a phoneme in a language should be low.
First language (L1) phonological knowledge may influence second language (L2) processing at different levels. The current study disentangles L2 low-level perception and a higher level of phonological encoding in the lexicon. L1-Mandarin L2-English bilinguals listened to English low vowel + nasal (loVN) contrasts in which the vowels pattern as allophones in Mandarin. The AX discrimination task revealed that sequential Mandarin-English bilinguals accurately perceived the sequences. A spoken word recognition task in a Visual World Paradigm, however, showed that in response to words with loVN sequences Mandarin-English bilinguals experienced more lexical competition than English L1 listeners in a relatively later time window. Taken together, this suggests that the influence of Mandarin phonology affects phono-lexical encoding to a greater extent than lower-level phonetic encoding. Moreover, the symmetric L2 competition between the L1-licit and L1-illicit loVN contexts suggests that L2 listeners are able to repurpose L1 allophones to phonemes in the L2. In addition, across language backgrounds, a larger receptive vocabulary size facilitates spoken word recognition. The phonological knowledge generalized across larger lexicons resolves competition more quickly for both bilingual and monolingual listeners. Overall, the study suggests that allophones, rather than phonemes, are mappable units in phono-lexical encoding by sequential bilinguals.
Though predictability has been found to play an important role in reduction processes in speech, its role in conditioning co-speech gestures has not been explored. Co-speech gestures are known to be crucially timed with prosodic events in speech, suggesting that their timing should also be influenced by predictability measures. In this paper, we examine how prosody and predictability interact to shape the timing of co-speech gestures in Igbo, a Niger-Congo language. In particular, we focus on a pattern of ‘gesture shift’ in which gestures, which would normally be expected to occur on word-final syllables in Igbo, shift earlier in the word, typically in prosodic environments in which word-final syllables are particularly prone to reduction due to vowel coalescence and articulatory overlap. As found in previous work, we demonstrate that lexical contextual probability is a stronger predictor of word durations, with more contextually predictable words produced with shorter durations. We also demonstrate a robust effect of vowel-to-vowel phonotactic probability on influencing co-speech gesture timing. Patterns of gesture shift suggest that durational variability influenced by prosodic structure and predictability form one route through which gesture timing is influenced, but that phonological redundancy serves as another independent predictor of gesture timing.
