On the origin and development of the Central Franconian tone contrast
... However, some more restricted tone systems, like Norwegian, Swedish, and Limburgian, do show complex intonation systems. In these languages, intonation tones interact with lexical tones, causing variation in surface realizations (i.e., contours) of a lexical tone (e.g.,Gussenhoven, 2000a;Riad, 2013). It has been suggested that surface variability in the contours of lexical tones can delay the acquisition of lexical tone assignment (Demuth, 1995;Ota, 2003). ...
... The Limburgian dialects of Dutch belong to the Central Franconian dialect-continuum which covers the provinces of Limburg in the Netherlands and Belgium as well as the north of the German Rhineland-Palatinate and the southwest of NorthRhine Westphalia (Gussenhoven, 2000a;Fournier, 2008; seeFigure 1). The Dutch province of Limburg has about 1.1 million inhabitants 3 , 75% of which speak a Limburgian dialect (Driessen, 2006). ...
In this study, Limburgian and Dutch 2.5- to 4-year-olds and adults took part in a word learning experiment. Following the procedure employed by Quam and Swingley (2010) and Singh et al. (2014), participants learned two novel word-object mappings. After training, word recognition was tested in correct pronunciation (CP) trials and mispronunciation (MP) trials featuring a pitch change. Since Limburgian is considered a restricted tone language, we expected that the pitch change would hinder word recognition in Limburgian, but not in non-tonal Dutch listeners. Contrary to our expectations, both Limburgian and Dutch children appeared to be sensitive to pitch changes in newly learned words, indicated by a significant decrease in target fixation in MP trials compared to CP trials. Limburgian and Dutch adults showed very strong naming effects in both trial types. The results are discussed against the background of the influence of the native prosodic system.
... To do this, we use Standard Dutch, the official language used in formal and institutional settings in the Netherlands, as our target language and Standard Dutch and Limburgian as our maskers. Several Limburgian dialects of Dutch are spoken in the province Limburg in the Netherlands and the Rhineland regions along the DutchBelgian-German border (Gussenhoven, 2000). Around 75% of the inhabitants of Limburg speak a Limburgian dialect (Driessen, 2006). ...
... It is also possible that our Limburgian listeners were too heterogeneous as a group, which prevented us from finding an interaction effect. As mentioned in Sec. 1, there are several Limburgian dialects of Dutch spoken in the province Limburg in the Netherlands, which makes Limburgian a heterogeneous language variety (Gussenhoven, 2000). For example, dialects that belong to the same region show a greater degree of phonological overlap than dialects from different regions. ...
Previous research has shown that the more similar the target and the masker signal, the harder it is to segregate the two streams effectively [i.e., target-masking linguistic similarity hypothesis, e.g., Brouwer, Van Engen, Calandruccio, and Bradlow (2012). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 131(2), 1449–1464]. The present study examined whether this hypothesis holds when a standard variety of a language (Dutch) is paired with one of its regional varieties (Limburgian). Dutch and Limburgian listeners were tested on a speech-in-speech recognition task to investigate whether familiarity with the target and/or maskers influenced their performance. The findings provide support for the hypothesis and suggest an influence of Limburgians' bidialectal status.
... Bolinger (1978), for instance, argued that the most "informative" or "interesting" aspects of the message are often associated with a heightened state of arousal, and when expressed in speech, this arousal would induce prosodic focus through greater articulatory efforts and more energetic movements. On the other hand, Gussenhoven (2000Gussenhoven ( , 2002 proposed that speakers can intentionally exploit certain biologically determined conditions (e.g., amount of articulatory energy exerted) to create intonational meanings (e.g., emphasis) through different phonetic implementations (e.g., wider pitch excursion: Wichmann et al., 1997), although a minority of languages may exhibit "unnatural" arbitrary form-function relations due to language change. In either case, words marked with prosodic focus are easier to process because of their acoustic clarity and greater spectral balance (Dahan & Bernard, 1996;Hawkins & Warren, 1994;Klatt, 1979;Redford et al., 2014), and various perceptual advantages have been revealed in different languages, including a deeper processing of focused words in lexical activation (Blutner & Sommer, 1988;Brunellière et al., 2019;Li & Ren, 2012;Norris et al., 2006;Wang et al., 2011), a faster and more accurate word recognition (Birch & Clifton, 1995;Cutler & Foss, 1997;Lee et al., 2016;McAllister, 1991), better retention in memory (Birch & Garnsey, 1995;Fraundorf et al., 2010;Kember et al., submitted), and better access to contextual alternatives (Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). ...
Many different prosodic cues can help listeners predict upcoming speech. However, no research to date has assessed listeners’ processing of preceding prosody from different speakers. The present experiments examine (1) whether individual speakers (of the same language variety) are likely to vary in their production of preceding prosody; (2) to the extent that there is talker variability, whether listeners are flexible enough to use any prosodic cues signaled by the individual speaker; and (3) whether types of prosodic cues (e.g., F0 versus duration) vary in informativeness. Using a phoneme-detection task, we examined whether listeners can entrain to different combinations of preceding prosodic cues to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. We used unsynthesized sentences recorded by four female native speakers of Australian English who happened to have used different preceding cues to produce sentences with prosodic focus: a combination of pre-focus overall duration cues, F0 and intensity (mean, maximum, range), and longer pre-target interval before the focused word onset (Speaker 1), only mean F0 cues, mean and maximum intensity, and longer pre-target interval (Speaker 2), only pre-target interval duration (Speaker 3), and only pre-focus overall duration and maximum intensity (Speaker 4). Listeners could entrain to almost every speaker’s cues (the exception being Speaker 4’s use of only pre-focus overall duration and maximum intensity), and could use whatever cues were available even when one of the cue sources was rendered uninformative. Our findings demonstrate both speaker variability and listener flexibility in the processing of prosodic focus.
... For example, according to Khattab and Al-Tamimi (2014), sonorants show a clearer distinction in singleton/geminate ratios than sibilants because sibilants are 'intrinsically' long. Bilabials and alveolars are longer than consonants with other places of articulation (e.g., palatals, velars, and pharyngeals), while voiced obstruents are shorter than voiceless ones (Gussenhoven, 2000). Thus, cross-linguistically, the most reliable and robust acoustic parameter that distinguishes a geminate consonant from a singleton consonant is the duration of the target consonants (See Malayalam (Local and Simpson, 1999); Levantine Arabic, Hungarian, Madurese (Ham, 2001); Arabic and Swedish (Hassan, 2002); Italian (Payne, 2005); Tashlhiyt Berber (Ridouane, 2007); among others). ...
This study provides a detailed acoustic description of gemination in Rural Jordanian Arabic (RJA), measuring the duration of geminate and singleton consonants across the full range of consonants and positions in an understudied variety of Arabic: RJA, a Levantine dialect spoken by village dwellers in the northern part of Jordan. The results show that position plays a role in phonetic gemination, with medial geminates substantially longer than those in final position. Vowels adjacent to medial consonants were also measured, and when adjacent to a geminate consonant, short vowels are found to be shorter, and long vowels are found to be longer than when adjacent to a singleton consonant.
... For example, according to Khattab and Al-Tamimi (2014), sonorants show a clearer distinction in singleton/geminate ratios than sibilants because sibilants are 'intrinsically' long. Bilabials and alveolars are longer than consonants with other places of articulation (e.g., palatals, velars, and pharyngeals), while voiced obstruents are shorter than voiceless ones (Gussenhoven, 2000). Thus, cross-linguistically, the most reliable and robust acoustic parameter that distinguishes a geminate consonant from a singleton consonant is the duration of the target consonants (See Malayalam (Local and Simpson, 1999); Levantine Arabic, Hungarian, Madurese (Ham, 2001); Arabic and ...
... Goizuetan eta inguruko beste hizkera nafar batzuetan, aldiz, hitz guztiak azentudunak dira, baina batzuek goranzko tonua daramate eta beste batzuek, beheranzkoa (Hualde, Lujanbio & Torreira, 2008). Hizkera horretan, azentu-sistemak antzekotasun handiagoa erakusten du Europako beste doinu-azentu sistema batzuekin, hala Fontes Linguae Vasconum (FLV), 123, enero-junio, 2017, 65-85 ISSN: 0046-435X ISSN-e: 2530-5832 nola suediera-norvegierarekin (ikus Bruce, 1977;Riad, 2012), Rhin aldeko hizkera behe-germaniarrekin (ikus Gussenhoven, 1999Gussenhoven, , 2000Gussenhoven, , 2004, letonierarekin (ikus Hualde & Riad 2014;Kariņš, 1997) eta serbiera-bosniera-kroazieraren hizkera batzuekin (Bethin, 1998;Godjevac, 1999;Smiljanić, 2006) eta antzinako grezierak (Horrocks, 1997) omen zuen doinu-azentu sistemarekin. ...
We report on an experiment on the acoustic cues of stress in the Basque variety of Azpeitia. We use singular/plural minimal pairs to examine acoustic differences between stressed and unstressed vowels. Both pitch and intensity appear to cue lexical stress. In particular, in the context that we have examined, stressed syllables show a pitch rise. On the other hand, we did not find a significant effect of vowel duration as a cue to stress. We compare these results with work on other Basque dialects and offer some speculation on the relationship between the role of duration as a cue to stress and phenomena of vowel deletion.
... Ohala 1981;Blevins 2004)? Or is it because the novel speech form is positively evaluated, leading to the desire to sound like and imitate the other speaker (Giles 1973;Gussenhoven 2000;Pierrehumbert 2001;Bybee 2002)? In sum, in sound change at least three different perspectives play a role: production, perception and evaluation, and the complex interplay between these three perspectives helps to define the process of selecting new variants in the language community (Yu 2013). ...
This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy. The individual chapters are bound together by a general introduction followed by an opening chapter that surveys 2500 years of linguistic, philosophical, and scientific reflections on chance, coincidence, fortune, randomness, luck and related concepts.
A main conclusion that can be drawn is that, even after all this time, we still cannot be sure whether chance is a truly fundamental and irreducible phenomenon, in that certain events are simply uncaused and could have been otherwise, or whether it is always simply a reflection of our ignorance. Other challenges that emerge from this book include a better understanding of the contextuality and perspectival character of chance (including its scale-dependence), and the curious fact that, throughout history (including contemporary science), chance has been used both as an explanation and as a hallmark of the absence of explanation. As such, this book challenges the reader to think about chance in a new way and to come to grips with this endlessly fascinating phenomenon.
This study investigates the realization of the two most common word-level stress patterns in Hebrew, final and penultimate, at utterance-final position. Twenty-six disyllabic words that form minimal pairs, which differ only in their stress pattern, were embedded in 52 sentences. The mean values of three acoustic parameters—duration, F0, and intensity—were measured for vowels of the target words. Findings show that duration is significantly longer at stressed vowels, similar to previous findings on words at utterance-mid position. Lower intensity is assigned to the utterance-final vowels regardless of the stress pattern, but the degree of lowering does depend on the stress pattern. Finally, lower F0 values are found in the utterance-final vowels, but the degree of lowering is similar to both stress patterns. We conclude that duration is the main cue at the prosodic word level, while F0 is used by Hebrew speakers to cue higher prosodic units.
Introduction Tone is often presented as one of the quintessential features identifying Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) as a linguistic area (Enfield 2011; Henderson 1965; Matisoff 2001). For Matisoff, the proliferation of tone languages is ‘[p]erhaps the most striking phonological feature of the South-East Asian linguistic area’ (2001: 291), while the ubiquity of tone tops Henderson's list of ‘features … typologically characteristic of a South East Asian linguistic area’ (1965: 401). The presence of tone in a large number of genetically unrelated languages has commonly been attributed to areal diffusion, with Chinese most commonly hypothesized as the ultimate source (Benedict 1996; Matisoff 1973; Pulleyblank 1986). The reference to tone as a ‘feature’ in the preceding citations might suggest that there exists a simple typological dichotomy between languages with and without tone. Upon closer inspection, however, the phonetic, phonological and typological characteristics of MSEA tone systems differ in important ways. To the extent that this diversity reflects substantive differences between languages, it raises the question of precisely what role contact has played in the evolution of tone in MSEA. In this chapter, we address this question through an examination of the phonetic and phonological properties of MSEA tone systems as well as of proposals regarding their evolution. After briefly discussing tone systems in the broader typological perspective, we present an overview of the phonetic, phonological and genetic characteristics of MSEA tone systems, emphasizing the rich variability of tonal realization found in the region. Next, we discuss the ways in which languages can become tonal, reviewing evidence for the spread of tone through contact as well as for the idea that much of the observed tonality on the ground in modern MSEA might be traced to a small number of ‘tonogenetic events’ rather than a large number of borrowings. In light of this discussion, we consider whether a re-evaluation of the notion of tone as a canonical indicator of ‘linguistic area’ more generally is warranted. While our treatment is focused on a particular geographic region, we hope that this areal perspective on tone can also be of use to scholars working in other linguistic areas where large numbers of genetically unrelated tone languages are present.
Despite the fact that many of the world's languages use lexical tone, the majority of language acquisition studies has focused on non-tone languages. Research on tone languages has typically investigated well-known tone languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. The current study looked at a Limburgian dialect of Dutch that uses lexical pitch differences, albeit in a rather restricted way. Using a visual habituation paradigm, 6- to 12-month-old Limburgian and Dutch infants were tested for their ability to discriminate Limburgian tones. The results showed that both Limburgian and Dutch infants discriminate the Limburgian tones throughout their first year of life. The role of linguistic experience, acoustic salience, and the degree of similarity to the native prosodic system are discussed.
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