This study performs a direct investigation of whether native-language (L1) experience with relevant auditory cues is reused in second language (L2) perception (as claimed by earlier indirect studies) by comparing two L1s, one with and one without the relevant cues. If L1 Dutch word-medial cues are indeed reused in the perception of final obstruent voicing in L2 English, Dutch learners of English should perceive this contrast better than Danish learners of English, who use no such cues in their L1 medial position. We indeed find that Dutch listeners outperform Danish listeners on naturally produced English, and that Dutch listeners use the periodicity cue more than Danish listeners in manipulated English. This provides evidence that L1 experience with relevant auditory cues is indeed reused in L2 perception.

Abstract Auditory-Orthographic cue integration challenges theories that explain orthographic influences on phonology simply by grapheme-to-phoneme conventions. By analyzing two such cases of cue integration, we propose a revised BiPhon model employing weighted positive constraints, with a reading grammar that gradually rewards featural correspondence. This approach offers greater cognitive plausibility and relies on fewer assumptions than existing alternatives. Furthermore, our computational simulations show that empirical findings cannot always be condensed to a single learner type with stochastic variation, highlighting the need to incorporate individual differences into formal phonological frameworks.

Native phonotactics influences speech perception, as numerous studies have shown. The present study tackles the question whether there is a difference in perceptual performance if the involved sequence occurs only in loanwords, compared to a sequence that does not occur at all in the native language. This was tested with the native Japanese sequences of palatal affricate plus /i/, compared to /ti/ (accepted only in loanwords) versus /zi/ (not accepted in Japanese) in an online AX discrimination task with 39 Japanese speakers (21-63 years old), who also had to answer three questions on their received English input. Participants performed significantly better at discriminating the accepted loan sequence /ti/, though discrimination of the foreign sequence /zi/ was also quite high (ranging from 40-100% correct). The results indicate that discriminability is only partly guided by native phonotactics. A potential role of amount of English input measured by self-report could not be attested.

This study examines whether creaky voice serves as a perceptual cue for the fortis-lenis word-initial stop distinction in Standard Seoul Korean. Twenty-nine native speakers completed an online forced-choice ABX task, where they determined whether a manipulated, artificially creaky lenis token (Sound X) with ambiguous values of VOT and F0 resembled more closely a natural fortis (Sound A) or a natural lenis token (Sound B). Results showed considerable inter-speaker variation: some rarely categorized creaky lenis tokens as fortis, while others did so up to 15% of the time. Statistical analysis showed that presence of creak in Sound X did not change the perceptual classification significantly, suggesting creak is not a primary cue alongside VOT and F0. Word-specific effects also emerged, highlighting the complexity of perceptual cues in Korean stop contrasts.

We present an exploratory analysis of F0 ratio, a proposed method to pick up octave jumps in the speech signal. Such jumps, often considered errors, are possibly indicative of the presence of creaky voice. This paper focuses on co-intrinsic voice quality in Seoul Korean fortis stops, building on previous data, and on the Danish contrastive voice quality stod. The results suggest that in Seoul Korean F0 ratio captures a clear jump upwards indicating a modality switch from creaky to modal voice, with a gender difference observed. This suggests that pitch jumps are not necessarily erroneous but may reflect systematic cues to phonological contrasts cued with creak. In Danish, F0 ratio captures a rising intonational contour for non-stod tokens and is able to categorise between stod and non-stod tokens with high accuracy, although this leaves open the question whether F0 ratio captures modality shifts in Danish, or rather a combination of modality shift and pitch contour differences.

Speech perception is influenced by language-specific phonological knowledge. While phonotactics has long been established to play a role, the study of how phonological alternations influence perception is still in its infancy. In this paper, we make a case for the latter by investigating the role of regressive voicing assimilation (RVA) in the perception of obstruent clusters in Emilian dialects of Italian. We provide empirical evidence from a phoneme-detection task, in which Emilian listeners reported to have heard [b] significantly more often in stimuli with a /p/ before a voiced obstruent (RVA context) than before a vowel (non-RVA context). Our experimental findings add to recent work on the influence of phonology on speech perception. In addition, we provide an explicit formalisation, which bolsters the need for a rigid distinction between phonetic, surface and underlying representation, and an explicit mapping between all three, both in the process of speech production and comprehension.

The present study provides a formal account for three types of experimental findings recurrently reported in the literature, yet not integrated into current L2 speech theories, namely individual variability, syllable-position effects and orthographic influences. By analysing examples from L2 acquisition of Portuguese, we show that all these L2 speech patterns can be formalised within a single generative linguistic model, the Harmonic-Grammar version of Bidirectional Phonology and Phonetics Model, which was originally proposed for native speech perception and production. Without resorting to any mechanism specific to L2 acquisition, our formal modelling suggests that L2 speech data can be addressed in a broader context, benefiting from well-developed formal phonological theories.

Despite the favourable economic situation in Germany over the last decade, the number of welfare recipients (similar to 5 million) remained at a persistently high level. One factor limiting individuals' abilities to exit welfare dependency into employment is informal care. This article analyses two aspects of informal care: childcare, considering the number of caregivers in a given family constellation, and the amount of time spent on eldercare. A panel of survey data with comprehensive information on welfare recipients is used. The waves from 2006 to 2017 are included. The results suggest that the chances of exiting welfare dependency for those in jobs covering needs are strongly impacted by the intensity of caregiving. Single parents, as well as welfare recipients who spend >10 h/wk on eldercare, especially persons providing both of these types of caregiving, have the lowest probabilities of leaving welfare dependency among all recipient groups.

Pitch tracking algorithms can show upward or downward jumps in F0 by one octave. These "octave jumps" are sometimes thought of as pitch-tracking "errors", in the sense that they constitute a "mistake" in the algorithm. Using Praat software, we discuss the point (which has been made before) that measured octave jumps often actually reflect genuine changes in periodicity and glottal-fold vibration. We illustrate this with the example of creaky voice in fortis stops in Seoul Korean. We argue (1) that when the goal is to capture periodicity or vocal-fold vibration, pitch-tracking algorithms capture F0 well, with pitch jumps possibly reflecting an important language-specific feature, and (2) that ignoring such jumps (due to assuming an error) could lead to misrepresentation of the properties of the language. To quantify these real F0 jumps, we introduce the notion of the "F0 ratio", which identifies potential F0 jumps and helps to chart the frequency of pitch jumps in a language.

The present study provides a formal account for three types of experimental findings recurrently reported in the literature, yet not integrated into current L2 speech theories, namely individual variability, syllable-position effects and orthographic influences. By analysing examples from L2 acquisition of Portuguese, we show that all these L2 speech patterns can be formalised within a single generative linguistic model, the Harmonic-Grammar version of Bidirectional Phonology and Phonetics Model, which was originally proposed for native speech perception and production. Without resorting to any mechanism specific to L2 acquisition, our formal modelling suggests that L2 speech data can be addressed in a broader context, benefiting from well-developed formal phonological theories.

We estimate the spatially heterogeneous effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on labor market dynamics in Germany until December 2021. While initially slightly stronger in rural regions and large agglomerations, adverse effects quickly become more pronounced and persistent in large agglomerations compared to all other region types. We ascribe the larger impact of the pandemic in large agglomerations to two factors. First, a combination of a higher share of skilled workers and jobs suitable for working from home is positively related to an increased inflow rate into unemployment. We argue that local spillover effects from reduced product market demand in large cities caused by changes in behavior such as working from home or online shopping are a possible explanation. Second, some of our results suggest that a lower outflow rate out of unemployment is associated with a higher precrisis unemployment rate in large agglomerations. This might reflect the less favorable composition of unemployment in large cities, which reduces the probability of transitions into employment during crises.

AbstractThe vowel system of Catalan has been the focus of many studies, though work on the varieties spoken on the island of Eivissa (Ibiza) are scarce, with a single mention of the possible merger of the mid back vowels /o, ɔ/ (Torres Torres, Marià. 1983. Aspectes del vocalisme tònic eivissenc.Eivissa14. 22–23). The present article provides the first acoustic analysis of the vowel inventory of 25 young native speakers of Eivissan Catalan, with a focus on the realisations of stressed /ə, ɛ/, and the back mid vowels /o, ɔ/. We employed Pillai scores (Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren & Katie Drager. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress.Journal of Phonetics34. 458–484) to compare the possibly merged pairs /ə, ɛ/ and /o, ɔ/ to the fully-contrasting neighbouring pairs /e, ɛ/ and /o, u/. Our results show that all participants had considerable overlap of stressed /ə/ and /ɛ/, and all but one had considerable overlap of the back mid vowels, while the fully contrastive pairs (/e, ɛ/ and /o, u/) showed almost no overlap.

In both signed and spoken languages, reduplication is a common process in the formation of morphologically complex structures, expressing, e.g., plurality and certain aspectual meanings. A framework in which spoken language reduplication has been formalized frequently is Optimality Theory (OT). While an important attribute of OT-constraints is their universality, to date, the question to what extent such constraints are modality-independent, and thus work for sign language reduplication as well, remains largely unanswered. In the present study, we offer the first OT-formalization of plural reduplication in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). The NGT-data reveal that this language features different plural allomorphs, the choice of which depends on phonological properties of the base noun. However, we also identify variation, e.g., all noun types allow for zero marking.In our formalization, we aim to introduce constraints that are maximally modality-independent, using constraint types that have previously been proposed for spoken language reduplication. Our formalization is the first to take into account base-reduplicant faithfulness for a sign language, and also the first to account for variation in sign language data by employing stochastic OT, whereby some noise is added to the ranking value of each constraint at evaluation time. Evaluating the modality-(in)dependence of our proposed account suggests that the types of constraints we employ as well as the evaluation in the spirit of stochastic OT are not specific to a modality, while the featural implementation is inevitably modality-dependent.

The sequence /zi/ does not occur in the Japanese language, and in loanwords from English, it is adapted as /d.i/, e.g., English busy - Japanese /bi.d.i/. While similar sequences of alveolar obstruent plus high vowel, such as /ti/ or /t./, also used to be avoided in Japanese, they are occurring in recent loanwords. Such formerly impossible sound sequences are likely to have emerged because current Japanese speakers have more contact with English than previous generations: extended exposure to English with its less restrictive phonotactics leads younger speakers to acquire less strong restrictions against the sequences in question in their Japanese. In the present study, we tested whether Japanese listeners are sensitive to the difference between [zi]-[d.i] in an online AX discrimination task. Our participants ranged in age from 18 to 65. We hypothesized that the younger the listeners are, the better they would be better at discriminating [zi]-[d.i] in non-words as they had more exposure to English, which allows /zi/. Our study could not confirm this hypothesis. Instead, we found large individual variation in performance, and a good discriminability in general, which leads us to expect that the occurrence of /zi/ in Japanese loanwords is imminent.

This study investigates the stop voicing contrast in Palestinian Arabic (PA) by examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) in both production and perception.An acoustic analysis of the recordings of 8 speakers showed that word-initial voiced stops in sentence context have an average VOT of -93 msec, and word-initial voiceless stops one of 29 msec.PA thus belongs, like most dialects of Arabic, to true voicing languages, i.e., languages with a contrast between voicing lead and short lag VOT.We furthermore tested whether the phoneme /b/, without voiceless counterpart /p/ in PA, has similar VOT values to /d, dˤ/, which have voiceless counterparts /t, tˤ/.Similarly, we compared /k/, without counterpart /g/ in the PA dialect we investigated, to /t, tˤ/.For /b/ we found very similar VOT values to /d, dˤ/, while for /k/ we found a difference to /t, tˤ/, attributable to a general tendency of velars to have longer VOT than dentialveolars.We thus found no evidence for a less contrastive realization of unpaired plosives in PA.In a categorization experiment of the denti-alveolar phoneme pairs with the same 8 speakers, VOT proved sufficient as a perceptual cue, though f0 of the following vowel also influenced the categorization.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour market has been substantial, but also heterogeneous. This report assesses whether differences in the size of the labour market impact mainly reflect that economic sectors have been differently affected by the pandemic or whether other factors, including regional characteristics, matter once the sectoral structure is accounted for. (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

The pre-NC vowel in many Bantu languages is generally understood to be long. In Bemba, where there is also a vowel length contrast, this raises the question whether the pre-NC vowel is phonetically as long as lexical long vowels and how phonologised this length might be. In contrast to lexically long vowels, pre-NC vowel length is attributed to vowel lengthening resulting from the restructuring of a nasal to create a prenasalised stop. This is thus relevant to whether such stops are treated as unit segments or not. The present paper focuses on the pre-NC vowel and presents an evaluation of whether the pre-NC vowel is monomoraic or bimoraic by considering both phonetic and phonological evidence. Segmental and most tonal evidence leans towards a monomoraic treatment of the pre-NC vowel. One set of tonal data, however, shows variation in moraicity, presenting a mixed picture that we conclude emanates from the intermediate phonetic duration of the pre-NC vowel.

Die Corona-Krise hat sich insbesondere auch auf den Arbeitsmarkt ausgewirkt. Der Lockdown hat zu Arbeitsplatzverlusten geführt - allen voran in der Hotel-, Gastronomie- und Tourismusbranche. Ebenso sind bestimmte Branchen von Kurzarbeit betroffen. Das hat Folgen für die Einkommenssituation der betroffenen Haushalte. Es lässt sich zeigen, dass Haushalte mit bereits vor der Krise niedrigeren Einkommen in der Krise stärkere Einkommensverluste erleiden. Allerdings entfaltet das Konjunktur- und Krisenbewältigungspaket der Bundesregierung mit Hilfsmaßnahmen durchaus seine Wirkung, um Arbeitsplätze zu stabilisieren und soziale Härten abzufedern. Davon profi tieren Männer jedoch vergleichsweise stärker als Frauen. The Coronavirus crisis has had a distinct impact on the labour market. The lockdown has led to job losses, especially in the catering and tourism industries. Certain sectors have also been affected by shortterm work. This also has consequences for the income situation of affected households. It is evident that households with incomes that were already lower before the crisis are more affected by income losses during the crisis. However, the federal government’s economic stimulus and crisis management aid package is certainly effective at stabilising jobs and averting social hardship. However, men benefit from this comparatively more than women.

The coronavirus crisis has had a distinct impact on the labour market. The lockdown has led to job losses, especially in the catering and tourism industries. Certain sectors have also been affected by short­term work. This also has consequences for the income situation of affected households. It is evident that households with incomes that were already lower before the crisis are more affected by income losses during the crisis. However, the federal government’s economic stimulus and crisis management aid package is certainly effective at stabilising jobs and averting social hardship. However, men benefit from this comparatively more than women.