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Purpose: Our goal is to understand how the different types of plural marking are understood and processed by children with cochlear implants (CIs): (a) how does salience affect the processing of plural marking, (b) how is this processing affected by the incomplete signal provided by the CIs, and (c) is it linked to individual factors such as chronological age, vocabulary development, and phonological working memory? Method: Sixteen children with CIs and 30 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH) participated in an eye-tracking study. Their task was to choose the corresponding picture to an auditorily presented singular or plural noun. Accuracy, reaction time, and gaze fixation were measured and analyzed with mixed-effect models. Results: Group differences were found in accuracy but not in reaction time or gaze fixation. Plural processing is qualitatively similar in children with CIs and children with NH, with more difficulties in processing plurals involving stem-vowel changes and less with those involving suffixes. Age effects indicate that processing abilities still evolve between 5 and 11 years, and processing is further linked to lexical development. Conclusions: Our results indicate that early implantation seems to be beneficial for the acquisition of plural as indicated by very small between-group differences in processing and comprehension. Processing is furthermore affected by the type of material (i.e., phonetic, phonological, or morphological) used to mark plural and less so by their segmental salience. Our study emphasizes the need to take into account the form of the linguistic material in future investigations at higher levels of processing.

This study investigates the role of orthography in German vowel production by Polish native speakers (L1) with German as a second language (L2). Eighteen intermediate to advanced Polish L2 German learners and 20 German native speakers were recorded during a picture-naming task in which half of the experimental items were explicitly marked in their orthographic representation for their vowel length (short or long). Duration measurements revealed that explicit orthographic marking helped the Polish L2 German learners produce the short-long contrast more native-like. Regarding vowel quality, group differences were interpreted to have been caused by (in)congruencies between L1 and L2 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. These findings have important implications for models of L2 speech learning and pronunciation training.

Purpose: This study examines the temporal organization of vocalic anticipation in German children from 3 to 7 years of age and adults. The main objective was to test for nonlinear processes in vocalic anticipation, which may result from the interaction between lingual gestural goals for individual vowels and those for their neighbors over time. Method: The technique of ultrasound imaging was employed to record tongue movement at 5 time points throughout short utterances of the form V1#CV2. Vocalic anticipation was examined with generalized additive modeling, an analytical approach allowing for the estimation of both linear and nonlinear influences on anticipatory processes. Results: Both adults and children exhibit nonlinear patterns of vocalic anticipation over time with the degree and extent of vocalic anticipation varying as a function of the individual consonants and vowels assembled. However, noticeable developmental discrepancies were found with vocalic anticipation being present earlier in children's utterances at 3-5 years of age in comparison to adults and, to some extent, 7-year-old children. Conclusions: A developmental transition towards more segmentally-specified coarticulatory organizations seems to occur from kindergarten to primary school to adulthood. In adults, nonlinear anticipatory patterns over time suggest a strong differentiation between the gestural goals for consecutive segments. In children, this differentiation is not yet mature: Vowels show greater prominence over time and seem activated more in phase with those of previous segments relative to adults. [Paper presented at the International Conference on Speech Motor Control (7th).]

Second language (L2) learners often speak with a strong accent, which can make them difficult to understand. However, familiarity with an accent enhances intelligibility. We propose that L2 learners are even more familiar with their own accented speech patterns and may thus understand self-produced L2 words better than others' accented productions, presumably because of adaptation. This hypothesis was tested by asking German learners of English to identify English words from minimal pairs that are distinguished by difficult L2 sound contrasts. Words had been spoken by the learners themselves or other learners who produced the contrasts equally well. Self-produced words were identified significantly better than others' productions. A second experiment revealed that better producers can exploit acoustic cues in perception more than poor producers, especially when the produced acoustic cues to the minimal pairs were clearly differentiated. The self-benefit, however, did not depend on production skills. We conclude that L2 learners adapt not only to their L1 accent in general but also to their own specific speech patterns. Speculating about L2 acquisition more generally, these results may raise the question whether adaptation to own, accented productions may be one reason why learners have difficulties to improve their pronunciation, since they may not notice a need to improve.

Background: In 2012 the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) was published as a parent-report screening assessment that considers parents' perceptions of their children's functional intelligibility with a range of communication partners that differ in levels of authority and familiarity in real-life situations. To date, the ICS has been translated into 60 languages (including German). Aims: To evaluate the psychometric properties of the German translation of the ICS ( = ICS-G), especially its reliability and validity, using four objective measures of speech sound disorder (SSD) severity--percentage of consonants correct (PCC); percentage of initial consonants correct (PICC); percentage of vowels correct (PVC); and percentage of phonemes correct (PPC). Methods & Procedures: Children who were typically developing (TD) and children with SSD (n = 181; 90 males, 81 females; mean age = 4.18 years, SD = 0.79 years, range = 3;0-5;11 years) were recruited through 13 kindergartens and 15 speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in Germany. All children's parents completed the ICS-G. To obtain an insight into the severity of SSD (n = 30), children's speech skills were assessed with PLAKSS-II. For the analysis of test-retest reliability the ICS-G was re-administered with a subsample of parents (n = 36) after 1 week. Outcomes & Results: The ICS-G had high internal consistency (a = 0.95, p < 0.001) and high test-retest reliability (r = 0.998, p < 0.001). The ICS-G total scores and item scores for both samples showed significant correlations, indicating good construct validity. Analyses revealed low but significant correlations with external factors (e.g., age, social class). Criterion validity was established through significant correlations between the ICS-G and scores for PCC (r = 0.43), PICC (r = 0.43), PVC (r = 0.62) and PPC (r = 0.47). The discriminatory ability of the ICS-G was indicated by significantly higher mean scores for the TD group (mean = 4.49, SD = 0.47) than the SSD group (mean = 3.97, SD = 0.63). Conclusions & Implications: The overall good psychometric properties of the ICS-G support its use by SLPs for clinical and research purposes with German-speaking children.

Recent studies suggest that infants' audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants' emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds on their ability to detect mismatches between concurrently presented auditory and visual vowels and related their performance to their productive abilities and later vocabulary size. Results show that infants' ability to detect mismatches between auditory and visually presented vowels differs depending on the vowels involved. Furthermore, infants' sensitivity to mismatches is modulated by their current articulatory knowledge and correlates with their vocabulary size at 12 months of age. This suggests that--aside from infants' ability to match nonnative audiovisual cues (Pons et al., 2009)--their ability to match "native" auditory and visual cues continues to develop during the first year of life. Our findings point to a potential role of salient vowel cues and productive abilities in the development of audiovisual speech perception, and further indicate a relation between infants' early sensitivity to audiovisual speech cues and their later language development.

Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential looking paradigm, 44 German 6-month olds' ability to detect mismatches between concurrently presented auditory and visual native vowels was tested. Outcomes were related to mothers' speech style and interactive behavior assessed during free play with their infant, and to infant-specific factors assessed through a questionnaire. Results show that mothers' and infants' social behavior modulated infants' preference for matching audiovisual speech. Moreover, infants' audiovisual speech perception correlated with later vocabulary size, suggesting a lasting effect on language development.

Previous research has shown that in different languages ironic speech is acoustically modulated compared to literal speech, and these modulations are assumed to aid the listener in the comprehension process by acting as cues that mark utterances as ironic. The present study was conducted to identify paraverbal features of German "ironic criticism" that may possibly act as irony cues by comparing acoustic measures of ironic and literal speech. For this purpose, samples of scripted ironic and literal target utterances produced by 14 female speakers were recorded and acoustically analyzed. Results showed that in contrast to literal remarks, ironic criticism was characterized by a decreased mean fundamental frequency (F[subscript 0]), raised energy levels and increased vowel duration, whereas F[subscript 0]-contours differed only marginally between both speech types. Furthermore, we found ironic speech to be characterized by vowel hyperarticulation, an acoustic feature which has so far not been considered as a possible irony cue. Contrary to our expectations, voice modulations in ironic speech were applied independently from the availability of additional, visual irony cues. The results are discussed in light of previous findings on acoustic features of irony yielded for other languages. (Contains 2 notes, 5 figures, and 3 tables.)

The development of native-like memory traces for foreign phonemes can be measured by using the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), a component of the auditory event-related potential. Previous studies have shown that the MMN is sensitive to changes in neural organization depending on language experience. Here we measured the MMN response in 5-6 year-old monolingual German and bilingual Turkish-German kindergarten children growing up in Germany. MMN was investigated to a German vowel contrast and to a vowel contrast that exists in Turkish and in German. The results show that compared to a German control group, the MMN response is less robust in Turkish-German children to the German vowel contrast. The response to the contrast that exists in both languages does not differ between groups. Overall, the results suggest that the Turkish-German children have not yet fully acquired the German phonetic inventory despite living in Germany since birth and being immersed in a German-speaking environment. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

In Dutch, vowel duration spelling is phonologically consistent but morphologically inconsistent (e.g., "paar--paren"). In German, it is phonologically inconsistent but morphologically consistent (e.g., "Paar--Paare"). Contrasting the two orthographies allowed us to examine the role of phonological and morphological consistency in the acquisition of the same orthographic feature. Dutch and German children in Grades 2 to 4 spelled singular and plural word forms and in a second task identified the correct spelling of singular and plural forms of the same nonword. Dutch children were better in word spelling, but German children outperformed the Dutch children in nonword selection. Also, whereas German children performed on a similar level for singular and plural items, Dutch children showed a large discrepancy. The results indicate that children use phonological and morphological rules from an early age but that the developmental balance between the two sources of information is constrained by the specific orthography.

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary mapping between phonetic properties and meanings. The existence and nature of sound symbolism have long been the subject of empirical research. It is rarely recognized, however, that participants' intrinsic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, language knowledge), in addition to the commonly studied phonetic features, may also influence size ratings. Our study aims to empirically investigate the impact of participant-specific characteristics on size ratings: It also aims to examine whether these characteristics have a direct impact when considering the impact of phonetic features or they rather modify the effects of phonetic features. The current research reports a novel analysis of a previously published dataset with new research questions and previously unused (participant-specific) data. We show that (a) the participants' characteristics did not affect overall size ratings; however, (b) in some cases, they modify (intensify or weaken but do not reverse) the effect of phonetic features on size ratings. Our results emphasize a more comprehensive treatment of sound symbolism, one that considers not only phonetic but also non-phonetic factors in sound symbolism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated a sound change in progress by which the Central Bavarian dialect feature of complementary length between consonant and the preceding vowel is giving way to the unrestricted combination possibility of long (Vː) and short (V) vowels with following longer fortis (Cː) and shorter lenis (C) stops, respectively. This 2 × 2 system is also found in the standard variety of German. While previous studies have regarded any such findings of convergence toward Standard German as being a result of language contact, the present study specifically tested the possibility of fast-speech-induced hypoarticulation being a system-internal driver of this change. The focus of this study was on acoustic cues to the postvocalic stop. Following the apparent-time paradigm, acoustic analyses of 10 younger and 10 older dialect speakers revealed that (1) younger dialect speakers produced both VC and VːCː (both formerly illegal in the dialect), but (2) older dialect speakers produced only VːCː sequences with duration patterns similar to those of the control group of 10 Standard German speakers. Analyses of various dependent variables further showed (3) the (apparently) delayed emergence of aspiration as an additional cue to the fortis–lenis contrast in Western Central Bavarian particularly in younger dialect speakers, (4) no considerable effect of speech rate on the dispersion of and overlap between any of the four vowel-plus-stop combinations, and (5) the irregular spread of this change that appears to be gradual. As such, the findings support a model of linguistic change that also accounts for gradual changes in dialect borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phrase-final lengthening affects the segments preceding a prosodic boundary. This prosodic variation is generally assumed to be independent of the phonemic identity. We refer to this as the 'uniform lengthening hypothesis' (ULH). However, in German, lax vowels do not undergo lengthening for word stress or shortening for increased speech rate, indicating that temporal properties might interact with phonemic identity. We test the ULH by comparing the effect of the boundary on acoustic and kinematic measures for tense and lax vowels and several coda consonants. We further examine if the boundary effect decreases with distance from the boundary. Ten native speakers of German were recorded by means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) while reading sentences that contained six minimal pairs varying in vowel tenseness and boundary type. In line with the ULH, the results show that the acoustic durations of lax vowels are lengthened phrase-finally, similarly to tense vowels. We find that acoustic lengthening is stronger the closer the segments are to the boundary. Articulatory parameters of the closing movements toward the post-vocalic consonants are affected by both phrasal position and identity of the preceding vowel. The results are discussed with regard to the interaction between prosodic structure and vowel tenseness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the phonology of a German four-year-old with asynchronous phonological development: age-level word structure and vowels, but a restricted consonantal inventory. Both expected and unexpected developmental patterns were evident. While the absence of dorsal non-continuants and most coronal and labiodental fricatives and affricates is not unexpected in four-year-olds with PPD, less expected was his mastery of more marked /l/ and /ʁ/ and the pervasive use of ungrooved interdental fricatives (or affricates) as substitutions. Ungrooved interdentals often replace grooved fricatives and affricates, but in his system, they also replaced stops in more marked prosodic positions (unstressed initial syllables and clusters) and labiodental /f/. His case profile demonstrates the autonomy of phonological tiers (levels) but also the restrictive interactions that occur when one tier dominates, in his case, word structure. A proposed treatment plan targets new feature combinations and consonant sequences in order to address the asynchrony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Both monolingual and bilingual children use learning constraints and heuristics to acquire new words from their environment. Overall, fast mapping abilities seem to be similar in both populations, but monolinguals rely more than bilinguals on the mutual exclusivity strategy. Our study probes the robustness of these results in a large group of children learning different language combinations, with a newly devised language-fair task that relies as little as possible on previous linguistic knowledge, in order to avoid disadvantaging bilingual children. Method: We tested 138 3- to 5-year-old mono- and bilingual children in their dominant language (German, French, Italian, or Turkish) in a computerized task starting with a fast mapping phase, followed by a mutual exclusivity phase, using only invented nonobjects and nonwords. Results: As hypothesized, monolingual and bilingual children showed similar results during the initial fast mapping stage, but monolinguals relied significantly more on the mutual exclusivity strategy than their bilingual peers. Conclusions: The language-fair design of our task supports the idea that differences in mutual exclusivity strategy use between mono- and bilingual children really stem from their specific linguistic background, and not from potential familiarity differences with respect to the test words. We discuss the implications of our results for bilingual language assessment in clinical or educational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with the history of the linguistic term 'umlaut' and its inclusion in the terminological systems of the German and Russian languages. The material includes German grammars, grammatical essays and dictionaries published in Germany from the beginning of the 16th to the middle of the 19th century, as well as similar sources published in Russia from the middle of the 18th to the middle of the 20th century. On the basis of this material, the author traces the development of the phonetic status of the umlaut, which was first considered a diphthong, then a half-diphthong ("semidiphthong"), because umlauts were generally believed to be pronounced as a bivocalic combination. In the first half of the 17th century, the approach to evaluating the status of umlauts begins to change. For example, Olearius (1630) counted the umlauts among the simple sounds. However, his position was not supported by other researchers of the time. A little later Ju. Schottel (1641) established the ability of the umlauts to realise a distinctive function. Nevertheless, until the beginning of the last quarter of the 18th century, the umlaut was incorrectly called a diphthongal sound combination. The term 'umlaut' itself was not introduced into German usage until 1774 by Fr. Klopstock, who defined it as any change in the root vowels, regardless of the reasons for such a change. The final status of the umlaut was established around the same time when linguists came to the unambiguous conclusion that, from a phonetic point of view, umlauts are simple vowels that require a single articulatory effort to be realised in speech. Russian linguists followed the authors of German grammars in defining the phonetic status of the umlaut. The term under study only entered the structure of Russian linguistic terminology at the end of the first third of the 20th century in two forms 'umlaut' and 'umlyaut'. From the end of the 18th to the end of the 19th century, it received several single-word or compound names: "ogolosok" (umlaut) (1799), "peremena glasnykh" (vowel change) (1844), "perezvuk" (umlaut) (1845), "pereglasovka" (umlaut resp. Umlautung) (1857), "sliyaniye glasnykh" (vowel fusion) (1864), "izmeneniye glasnoy" (vowel change) (1871), "pereglasovaniye" (vowel change) (1882), "suzhivaniye glasnykh" (vowel narrowing) (1895). So far, only the synonym "pereglasovka" has been retained in the terminological system alongside the Cyrillic transliterated name of German origin "umlaut". In research, methods of historical-linguistic, definitional, semantic and comparative analysis are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the description of German phonology, two distinct phonetic symbols are currently recommended for the transcription of the vowels [a] (a central low vowel, phonemically /a/) and [ɐ] (phonemically /əʁ/) in word-final, unstressed positions. The present study examines whether differences between these two vowels exist in production and perception of Standard German speakers from the north of Germany. In Experiment 1, six speakers produced a series of minimal pairs that were embedded in meaningful sentences and varied with respect to their accentuation and position within a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, the minimal pairs produced by the six speakers of the first experiment were extracted from their respective contexts and tested with 44 native German listeners in a forced-choice identification task. Perceptual results showed a better-than-chance performance for one male speaker of the corpus only. Phonetic analyses also confirmed that only this male speaker produced subtle, but consistent F2/F3 differences between [a] and [ɐ] while the contrast was completely neutralised in the rest of the corpus. We discuss the role of prosody in vowel neutralisation with a specific focus on unstressed vowels and make suggestions for phonetic and phonological accounts of Standard German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examined German spelling errors among students with German as their first language (L1) and those with German as their second language (L2) in Grades 3–4 (elementary school students; n = 127) and Grades 5–7 (secondary school students; n = 379). Five hundred and six students participated in the study. We performed two separate latent class analyses on elementary and secondary school students. Results indicate that elementary school students can be categorized as good (Class 1), consonant error dominant (Class 2), or poor (Class 3) spellers. However, secondary students can be categorized as addition and sequence error dominant (Class 1), substitution and omission error dominant (Class 2), or poor (Class 3) spellers. The three-step multinomial logistic regression analyses suggested that decoding was associated with the highest chances of being poor spellers in both elementary and secondary schools. Speaking German as L1 or L2 was a significant predictor of heterogeneities in secondary, but not elementary, school students. Polish L1 secondary students had the highest possibility of being poor spellers. The results suggest heterogeneities of student profiles. In addition, special attention should be given to secondary school students with the Polish L1 background in their spelling struggles associated with German orthography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the study presented in this paper the use of a specific linguistic non-standard feature of German by 100 speakers representing three generations was analysed. The speakers originate from 25 different locations within the Middle Franconian dialect formation covering the middle-western parts of Germany. The feature analysed is the realisation of the Standard German phoneme /r/ as a voiceless velar or uvular fricative [x, χ] when following a short vowel and preceding a coronal obstruent. The comparison of how frequently the speakers use [χ] in different communicative contexts results in the observation of three types of speakers (i. e., [χ] users): The first type are dialect speakers mostly of the older generation (60 years and above) who use the variant in a traditional manner, namely when aiming at producing their best way to pronounce Standard German. According to these speakers [χ] forms part of the Standard German pronunciation norm. The second type is mainly represented by middle aged speakers (45-55 years) who use the feature in nearly all communicative contexts except when they have a dialect competency and are asked to produce their "strongest dialect". Finally, the third type of speakers are mainly young people (17-23 years) who do not have any dialect competence. These speakers only use [χ] when they are asked to produce their "strongest dialect" and/or when they are talking to friends. On the basis of these results it is argued that, between these types of speakers and the generations they represent, a re-evaluation of the feature has taken place that may be classified as enregisterment, because speakers of the third type seem to use [χ] indexically in order to signal familiarity with their interlocutors on a interpersonal-social level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prelexical phonetic capacities have widely been described to be a precursor for later speech and language development. However, studies so far varied greatly in the measurements used for the detection of canonical babbling onset or the description of infants' phonetic capacities at one or more set time points. The comparability of results is, therefore, questionable. Thus, the aims of this study were to investigate the associations between (1) different measurements of CBO, (2) different aspects of phonetic capacity at the age of 9 months and (3) age of CBO and phonetic capacities at 9 months. A further aim (4) was to explore whether one of the measures would be suitable to predict the age of word onset (WO) in 20 healthy German-acquiring individuals. The data were derived from monthly recorded spontaneous speech samples between 0 and 18 months. It was found that the different applied prelexical measures equally well serve as valid estimators for the detection of CBO or of infants' phonetic capacities. Further, age of CBO and phonetic capacities at 9 months were significantly associated even though the age of CBO did not reliably predict phonetic capacities. Prelexical measures and WO were not related. Reasons for no indication of a significant association are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production abilities of second language (L2) learners for two non-native contrasts differing in their expected degree of difficulty. German learners of English were tested on perceptual categorization, imitation and a word reading task for the difficult English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast, which tends not to be well encoded in the learners' phonological inventories, and the easy, near-native /i/-/ɪ/ contrast. As expected, within-task comparisons between contrasts revealed more robust perception and better differentiation during production for /i/-/ɪ/ than /ɛ/-/æ/. Imitation also followed this pattern, suggesting that imitation is modulated by the phonological encoding of L2 categories. Moreover, learners' ability to imitate /ɛ/ and /æ/ was related to their perception of that contrast, confirming a tight perception-production link at the phonological level for difficult L2 sound contrasts. However, no relationship was observed between acoustic measures for imitated and read-aloud tokens of /ɛ/ and /æ/. This dissociation is mostly attributed to the influence of inaccurate non-native lexical representations in the word reading task. We conclude that imitation is strongly related to the phonological representation of L2 sound contrasts, but does not need to reflect the learners' productive usage of such non-native distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the reading and listening of music language such as singing the short and open vowels, and the long and closed vowels in German. Topics discussed include overclosing the open and short vowels and sometimes not sufficient closing of the long and closed vowels; the suggestion of 19th edition of Siebs Deutsche Aussprache on classical singing; and the author's experience of dealing with varying voice types, linguistic backgrounds, levels of training.

The article discusses the emerging classical singing trends to use dark laterals if variants are in the spoken language and to change the tongue-tip pronunciation of a vibrant or trill as of 2017. Topics covered include the practices' possible aim to sound less archaic for younger audiences, and the opposition from traditional quarters which view dark laterals as incompatible with art song. Also noted are the acoustic lateral differences in speech and singing in German, Norwegian, and English.

This paper describes a cross-linguistic production study of devoicing for European Portuguese (EP), Italian, and German. We recorded all stops and fricatives in four vowel contexts and two word positions. We computed the devoicing of the time-varying patterns throughout the stop and fricative duration. Our results show that regarding devoicing behaviour, EP is more similar to German than Italian. While Italian shows almost no devoicing of all phonologically voiced consonants, both EP and German show strong and consistent devoicing through the entire consonant. Differences in consonant position showed no effect for EP and Italian, but were significantly different for German. The height of the vowel context had an effect for German and EP. For EP, we showed that a more posterior place of articulation and low vowel context lead to significantly more devoicing. However, in contrast to German, we could not find an influence of consonant position on devoicing. The high devoicing for all phonologically voiced stops and fricatives and the vowel context influence are a surprising new result. With respect to voicing maintenance, EP is more like German than other Romance languages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study shows how different phonetic productions of the same word pair perform different actions in conversation. The German words for “yes” and “but” share the same vowel at the word boundary:ja aber. Data from naturally occurring talk show that German speakers exploit this property of their language to differentiate betweenja aberandjaber.The phonetic distinction co-occurs with a distinction in how actions are formatted. Inja aberturns,japerforms a separate action, often as a second pair part, providing an elicited confirming response. The action initiated byaberis typically disaffiliative and done for the first time. In contrast,jaber-fronted turns are rarely second pair parts and perform one single disaffiliative action, which is a redoing of a previously accomplished or attempted action. The frequent occurrence ofjaberin the corpus suggests that the item is being used as a wordlike entity similar to a discourse marker. The findings reveal that for participants the local requirement to manage action boundaries is more relevant than linguistic word boundaries that may exist outside the interactional context. Data are in German with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is still unclear whether phonological processing deficits are the underlying cause of developmental dyslexia, or rather a consequence of basic auditory processing impairments. To avoid methodological confounds, in the current study the same task and stimuli of comparable complexity were used to investigate both phonological and basic auditory (temporal and spectral) processing in dyslexia. German dyslexic children (Grades 3 and 4) were compared to age- and grade-matched controls in a vowel length discrimination task with three experimental conditions: In a phonological condition, natural vowels were used, differing both with respect to temporal and spectral information (in German, vowel length is phonemic, and vowel length differences are characterized by both temporal and spectral information). In a temporal condition, spectral information differentiating between the two vowels of a pair was eliminated, whereas in a spectral condition, temporal differences were removed. As performance measure, the sensitivity index d ′ was computed. At the group level, dyslexic children's performance was inferior to that of controls for phonological as well as temporal and spectral vowel length discrimination. At an individual level, nearly half of the dyslexic sample was characterized by deficits in all three conditions, but there were also some children showing no deficits at all. These results reveal on the one hand that phonological processing deficits in dyslexia may stem from impairments in processing temporal and spectral information in the speech signal. On the other hand they indicate, however, that not all dyslexic children might be characterized by phonological or auditory processing deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigates the historical unconditioned merger of palatal /ç/ (< Middle High German /x/) and postalveolar /ʃ/ into alveolopalatal /ɕ/ in certain varieties of Central German. It will be shown that the phonemicization of the alveolopalatal was the final stage in a gradual reduction of segmental markedness. Thus, /ç/ and /ʃ/ are argued to be featurally complex segments, while /ɕ/ is featurally simplex. Independent support for the proposed analysis can be found in the concomitant reduction of markedness in the vowel system of the dialects in question. The present study sheds light on the factors involved in explaining context-free phonological change and the historical source of the alveolopalatal /ɕ/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mucopolysaccharidoses are a group of lysosomal disorders characterized by abnormal accumulation of glycosaminoglycans within cell lysosomes leading to a variety of signs and symptoms including alterations in speech and voice production. These changes were analysed in 44 patients with mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS) types I, II, and VI using standardized protocols. Compared to healthy individuals the diadochokinetic rate for the fast repetition of syllables was slower and more irregular, the voice-onset time for the voiceless consonant /p/ was shorter, and most patients had a hoarse voice. The fundamental frequency (F0) of sustained spoken vowels was in the normal range for most women and children with MPS, but adult males with MPS had a higher F0 than healthy men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, sung speech is used as a methodological tool to explore temporal variability in the timing of word-internal consonants and vowels. It is hypothesized that temporal variability/stability becomes clearer under the varying rhythmical conditions induced by song. This is explored crosslinguistically in German — a language that exhibits a potential vocalic quantity distinction — and the non-quantity languages French and Russian. Songs by non-professional singers, i.e. parents that sang to their infants aged 2 to 13 months in a non-laboratory setting, were recorded and analyzed. Vowel and consonant durations at syllable contacts of trochaic word types with CVCV or CV CV structure were measured under varying rhythmical conditions. Evidence is provided that in German non-professional singing, the two syllable structures can be differentiated by two distinct temporal variability patterns: vocalic variability (and consonantal stability) was found to be dominant in CV CV structures whereas consonantal variability (and vocalic stability) was characteristic for CVCV structures. In French and Russian, however, only vocalic variability seemed to apply. Additionally, findings suggest that the different temporal patterns found in German were also supported by the stability pattern at the tonal level. These results point to subtle (supra) segmental timing mechanisms in sung speech that affect temporal targets according to the specific prosodic nature of the language in question. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the specific features of syllabification in the French, Italian, German and English languages and the relevance that syllabification has to singing and voice instruction. A discussion of the orthographic and phonetic aspects of syllabification is presented. A large degree of understanding of syllabification and proper juncture which is required by musical accompanists if they are to interact successfully with singers when attempting to create fluid musical performances is examined.

This article is concerned with the description and analysis of Övdalian referential null subjects. A general background to Övdalian is provided together with the syntactic restrictions on the possible null subjects (wįδ 'we' and i∂ 'you'). Interestingly, these null subjects in Övdalian do not appear in the same syntactic positions. This syntactic difference leads us to the conclusion that the distribution of the two possible null subjects must be explained individually. I argue here that the syntactic restrictions indicate that null wį∂ requires a link to the surrounding context in order to be identified, whereas the identification of null i∂ seems to be dependent on the agreement affix. I build on the proposal of Koeneman (2006), and argue that affixes may have pronominal properties, proposing that this gives an explanation as to why null i∂ is not restricted in the same fashion as null wį∂. Finally, Övdalian is discussed in a wider Germanic context, and it is shown that Övdalian is one of a small number of non-standard Germanic languages which allow referential null subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present discussion re-opens an old issue that was ?officially discussed? in Kiel in 1989 but has not been offered for debate in the wider phonetic community. It is argued that there is a logical and practical gap in the present IPA vowel chart. The lack of a central open vowel is unsatisfactory, in particular because more languages have a single open vowel with an apparently more central than fronted or backed quality. Arguments and suggestions for a number of alternative solutions to the problem are presented for discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the different phonetic parameters of final devoicing an acoustic analysis of German obstruent realizations was carried out focusing on the adequacy of the word material employed and the consistency of the phonetic realizations produced by speakers from different regions of Germany. Three types of sample words were used: (1) words containing (a) voiced obstruents and (b) their devoiced counterparts (i.e., words in which these obstruents appear in syllable- or word-final position), (2) voiceless control items and (3) corresponding words ending in nasals and liquids (dummy items). The test items—embedded into a sentence frame—were read by six native speakers taken from the three main dialectal areas of Germany. They were manually segmented with respect to the durational parameters: vowel duration (VOC), voicing into closure or friction (VC), plosive or fricative duration (CODA). In a MANOVA analysis the durations of VC, VOC and CODA in plosives revealed significant effects of voiced vs. voiceless obstruents in medial (nonneutralizing) position. These differences are neutralized in syllable-final and word-final positions: In utterance-final position VOC and VC are completely neutralized by all speakers, while South German speakers preserve the durational differences in CODA between underlying voiced and voiceless plosives. In fricatives, there is complete neutralization in utterance-final position for all speakers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]