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This study investigates the production of English contrastive focus by 26 L1 Mandarin speakers (MS) and 21 native English speakers (ES). The participants completed an interactive game in which they directed experimenters to decorate objects, producing sentences with contrasted adjective or noun (e.g., Andy wants an orange diamond on his towel and a NAVY diamond/orange OVAL on Mindy’s towel). Our results show that while both groups were similar in their use of intensity, the MS used less lengthening of focused words than did ES. While both groups showed a pitch peak on focused adjectives, they differed in the noun-focus condition: while the MS exhibited what is normally considered canonical pitch prosody, with peaks on both focused adjectives and focused nouns, many of the ES’ productions lacked the expected pitch peak on a focused noun. The ES’ divergence from textbook focus prosody reflected their use of an innovative intonation pattern, especially prominent among young native English speakers (Wolk et al. 2012), which is characterized by pitch declination and an increase in vocal fry throughout the intonational phrase. We conclude that this intonation pattern restricted the ES’s ability to use pitch rises to mark focus on phrase-final nouns.

This study tracks the production of English corrective focus by Mandarin speakers (MS) living in the US over a two-year period. We show that the MS differed from English speakers (ES) in the alignment of the corrective focus pitch accent: while ES productions typically showed a pitch peak on the stressed syllable, followed by an abrupt fall, the pitch rise and fall for MS was later and less steep. While the MS productions became more English-like over time in some respects, the failure to correctly align pitch accent persisted over time. We argue that this misalignment of pitch peak cannot be attributed to a lack of sensitivity to English stress, but rather represents a common failure to master the complex timing patterns involved in synchronizing pitch, intensity, and duration cues with segmental structure in a second language.

Several studies have found that the presence of L+H* accent on a contrastive adjective assists native-speaking listeners in narrowing the referent of the noun following the adjective (e.g., Ito & Speer 2008, Weber et al. 2006). Our study addresses two questions: whether non-native speakers use prosodic cues in processing, as previous studies have shown for native speakers, and whether there is a relationship between the use of prosodic cues in processing and in production. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and twenty-one native English speakers participated in two tasks investigating their processing and production of prosodic cues to contrastive focus. In the processing task, participants responded to the same recorded instruction containing an accented adjective in different contexts, in which the adjective was either contrastive (and therefore appropriately accented) or was repeated and followed by a contrasting noun, making focus accent on the adjective inappropriate. In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a whiteboard, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus. Overall results indicate that the Mandarin speakers made use of prosodic cues in both processing and production, although their focus prosody production differed from that of native speakers in several respects. Comparison of the results in the two experiments did not find strong correlations between processing and production. These results suggest that there is considerable heterogeneity even among native speakers in the use of prosodic cues in processing and production, and even those who do not use prosodic cues in processing may use them in production.

tics. Overall, this book showcases not only the diversity of languages and dialects found in thesestates, but also the diversity of approaches to describing and understanding that diversity. Ofcourse even in this project, there remain gaps. For example, a contribution on Michigan’s thrivingArabic-speaking communities (noted on p. iv) would have been welcome. The success of thisproject should certainly encourage those in other states and areas to pursue similar work, andthe book provides a very useful model. Ultimately, as Hirvonen points out, ‘At the grassrootslevel there is more linguistic diversity in the Upper Midwest than meets the eye’ (239).REFERENCES

One of the most interesting features of language contact situations involves the appearance of systematic patterns that are not manifested in either of the two languages in contact. A full analysis of such patterns may require constraint rankings that differ from those of both the native and the target languages. I examine possible sources of these constraint rankings with respect to the devoicing of final obstruents in learners whose native language contains either no final consonants or no final obstruents, and whose target language contains both voiced and voiceless final obstruents. I conclude that the interlanguage ranking follows from the frequency of different input structures, given the assumption that constraint rankings are stochastic (Boersma & Hayes, 2001), and that final devoicing is an effect of positional markedness constraints. I then consider possible alternative explanations of interlanguage final devoicing: as a reflection of native language rankings of positional faithfulness constraints; as an effect of perceptual filtering; and/or as a function of articulatory difficulty of sustaining voicing in final position.

Our study compared the processing and production of English focus prosody by native speakers of English and Mandarin. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and 21 English speakers participated in two tasks. In the processing task, participants responded to instructions that contained natural or unnatural contrastive prosody (Click on the purple sweater; Now click on the SCARLET sweater/Now click on the PURPLE jacket.) In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a white board, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus (Put the yellow arrow over the ORANGE arrow/yellow DIAMOND, please). All adjectives and nouns were bisyllabic trochees. The two groups differed in their realization of focus, with English speakers tending to align the pitch peak with the stressed syllable and Mandarin speakers with the right edge of the focused word. However, comparison of reaction times for the processing task indicated that both groups responded more quickly ...

This paper discusses the simplification of forms ending in obstruents by native speakers of Mandarin, in particular two effects that are not obviously motivated by either the native- or the target-language grammars: a tendency to devoice final voiced obstruents and a tendency to maximize the number of bisyllabic forms in the output. These patterns are accounted for within Optimality Theory, which describes a grammar as a set of universal, ranked constraints. It is argued that the devoicing and bisyllabicity effects result from universal markedness constraints that are present in all grammars but that are masked in the learner's native-language grammar by the effects of higher ranking constraints.

In some languages, syllable weight depends exclusively on vowel length, while in others, coda consonants add weight to syllables. In this paper we assume that syllable weight is reflected in moraic structure, and that weight-bearing coda consonants are the exclusive dependents of a mora, while weightless consonants share a mora with the preceding vowel. We consider whether the durations of vowels and coda consonants reflect the distinction between a segment which occupies its own mora and a segment that shares a mora. We examine three patterns of coda weight, reflected in stress assignment: in Hindi, codas always contribute to syllable weight; in Malayalam, coda consonants are always weightless; and in Levantine Arabic, coda weight is contextually determined, with word-internal codas contributing to syllable weight following a short vowel, but weightless following a long vowel. These phonological patterns translate into different moraic representations of CVC and CVVC syllables across the different languages. We examine the durations of vowels and coda consonants in CV, CVC, CVV and CVVC syllables in Hindi, Malayalam and Levantine Arabic, and find that in all three languages, segments that we represent as mora-sharing are significantly shorter than segments that we represent as occupying an independent mora. The striking differences in durational patterns across the three languages correlate with the different moraic representations proposed on the basis of phonological patterning.

We report on a longitudinal investigation of the realization of English focus by 19 Mandarin-speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Participants read passages containing contrastive information (e.g., The price of a train ticket is twenty dollars, while the price of a bus ticket is eleven dollars), and then responded to the experimenter’s questions (Is the price of a bus ticket twenty dollars?). ITAs were tested within a month of their arrival in the US, and again at the end of their first semester. Overall, the productions of ITAs at both points in time were judged as less natural by native English listeners than the productions of the native speakers of English, though the naturalness of some ITA productions improved at the second sampling. Acoustic analyses of the ITA productions and comparison with the productions of 18 native English speakers revealed a good deal of interspeaker variability in the ITA productions, with several different patterns associated with the “unnatural” productions: (a) failure to accent the focused element; (b) failure to deaccent the word following the focused element; and (c) failure to align the accent with the stressed syllable of the focused word, with the entire focused word spoken on high pitch.

This paper reports on studies of second language acquisition in two domains, phonology and syntax. The phenomena investigated were the acquisition by native speakers of Hindi, Japanese, and Korean of two areas of English: in phonology, the mastery of particular syllable onset clusters, and in syntax, the acquisition of the binding patterns of reflexive anaphors. Both these areas are ones for which multi-valued parameters have been posited to account for the range of variation across natural languages. The paper presents evidence that acquisition in these two areas is quite similar: at a certain stage of acquisition learners seem to arrive at a parameter setting that is midway between the native and the target language settings. This effect occurs both when the target language employs a less marked setting than the native language and when the target language setting is more marked than that of the native language.

As has long been recognized, the isomorphism between word edges and word-internal syllable edges is far from perfect. This paper examines the fit between an Optimality-Theoretic account of edge/interior asymmetries, using position-specific faithfulness constraints to protect edges or interiors of morphological constituents, and the actual typology of attested edge/interior asymmetries. A detailed analysis of the Indonesian language Balantak, in which the first member of a CC cluster is severely restricted unless that first C is root-final, is compatible with the positional faithfulness account, but is problematic for accounts that explain greater freedom at edges solely in terms of licensing by higher prosodic structure or by phonetic context. I argue that a theory of edge/interior asymmetries must incorporate two possible functions of phonotactic restrictions: to facilitate recovery of segmental contrasts, and to facilitate the parsing of strings into morphemes.

The transformation of words borrowed from Bahasa Indonesia into Selayarese, a Makassar language of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, can be accounted for by a set of well motivated constraints. In this paper (to appear in BLS 25), I consider whether the rankings required by the loanword phonology are motivated by the native language data and if not, whether they correspond to default, initial-state rankings. I discuss two aspects of loan phonology. First, I show that the complex pattern of stress-epenthesis interaction follows from an analysis in which inclusion of epenthetic vowels in the main stress foot is avoided where possible (as proposed in Alderete, to appear). Second, I consider the treatment of borrowed words with illegal Selayarese codas. Most illegal codas are transformed into a legal Selayarese coda segment, but /r,l,s/ are transformed into onsets by epenthesis of a following vowel. The analysis proposed here, reminiscent of the familiar notion of phoneme substitution, is that illegal coda segments are realized as the 'closest' native language segment that is acceptable in coda position. For /r,l,s/, the lack of a sufficiently close correspondent (where closeness is defined in terms of ranking of IDENT constraints) makes segment transformation unacceptable, leaving vowel epenthesis as the optimal strategy for adapting final /r,l,s/ to the Selayarese coda requirements. This analysis accounts not only for the loanword data but also for paradigm gaps-namely, the fact that the native language vocabulary contains roots that end in /r,l,s/ but in no other illegal codas. I argue that this analysis of paradigm gaps is superior to the analysis of similar paradigm gaps offered by McCarthy (to appear) as a result of the blocking of vowel epenthesis by non-transparent consonants.

We report on results of perception experiments comparing Korean and English native speakers on stop-nasal sequences. In a categorization task, Korean listeners reported the presence of a vowel significantly more often than English listeners only when the stop was voiced. However, in an ERP experiment, both groups displayed significant MMN responses to the presence/absence of the vowel regardless of the voicing of the stop. The results of the current experiments provide evidence that language-specific perception of the absence/presence of a vowel in stop-nasal sequences takes place not at the preattentive auditory level but rather at the level of phonological categorization.

In Korean, intervocalic [l] is realized as tap ([tal]/[tar‐i] ‘moon/moon+nom’). In English loanwords, however, intervocalic /l/ is generally adapted as a geminate lateral ([sollo] ‘solo’ but [sara] ‘Sarah’). We present evidence from event‐related potentials supporting an analysis in which Korean listeners perceive intervocalic single [l] (illegal in Korean) as geminate [ll], reinterpreting the English [r‐l] contrast in terms of the Korean [r‐ll] contrast ([dari] ‘bridge’, [dalli] ‘differently’). Korean and English participants heard two sets of oddball paradigms, [ele‐elle] and [ene‐enne]. In both cases, the acoustic difference is the same, 48 versus 98 msec. However, the nasal pair represents a cross‐category contrast in Korean ([kanan] ‘poverty’, [kannan] ‘newborn’) while the lateral pair represents a noncontrastive difference. Consistent with studies showing a stronger mismatch negativity (MMN) to cross‐category changes than to within‐category changes, Korean listeners displayed a significantly larger ...

In the preceding sections I have argued that Lushootseed and Thompson/Shuswap differ in certain important ways, and that these differences can be accounted for in a unified fashion by assuming that in Lushootseed the diminutive morpheme is a prefix, while in the Interior Salish languages it is an infix. The differing forms of doubly reduplicated words were argued to follow from these differences in word structure, and the principle of subjacency, interpreted to prohibit the copying of phonemic melodies across two cyclic nodes, was argued to be a universal principle constraining the operation of morphological rules. The larger conclusion suggested by this analysis is that the morphological and the syntactic components of the grammar are not so disparate as they might appear to be at first glance; we can see the same principles operating on the level of the word and the level of the sentence. The analysis presented above involves certain assumptions which deserve further discussion. In particular, it was assumed that infixing is the attachment of a morpheme to a phonological constituent rather than to a morphological constituent; in terms of the infix discussed above, this means that the diminutive in the Interior Salish languages is subcategorized to occur before a stressed syllable rather than before a stem, as in Lushootseed. The infix is not, at least in surface structure, integrated into the tree structure of the word; instead, it is attached in a linear fashion to some element in the phonological representation, and certain operations — the copying of the phonemic melody of a stem, in this case — can take place independently on the phonological and on the morphological tiers. This assumption raises the question of at what level and in what way infixes are related to the other morphemes of a word. A treatment of this question is beyond the scope of this paper; I will note here only that this problem is the same one faced in describing the morphological structure of languages, such as Semitic languages, which make extensive use of nonconcatenative systems of morphology (McCarthy 1981). An analysis of the relationship between the phonological structure and the morphological structure of Salish infixal words should generalize to other, more consistently nonconcatenative languages.

This paper discusses several patterns of incorrect production and perception of a foreign language, and offers accounts of these error patterns in terms of a particular theory of the representation of phonological structure. All the errors discussed involve some aspect of prosody, and are argued to result from differences in constraints on prosodic structure in the native language and the foreign language. These error patterns are interesting from two perspectives. First, the cases discussed provide justification for the claim that linguistic theory is relevant to second language (L2) acquisition by presenting evidence that the errors of language learners can be seen as perfectly comprehensible and even predictable given particular theoretical constructs. Second, the patterns discussed provide evidence for the relevance of data from L2 acquisition to the concerns of linguistic theory. Specifically, I argue that error patterns may provide evidence for particular analyses of the native language grammar, evidence that may not be available from the study of the native language alone.