Language and Speech

This study addresses the relationship between information structure and intonation in French. Using an interactive speech production experiment, it tests the hypothesis that the French initial rise (LHi) is used to mark the left edge of a contrastively focused constituent. Since the occurrence of the initial rise is also known to be sensitive to the length of an Accentual Phrase (AP), AP length was manipulated within the same experiment in a 2 × 2 design. This made it possible to explore the issue of whether the initial rise represents a true marker of focus in the traditional sense, or whether the association is less direct. The results show that focus and phrase length make contributions to the distribution of the initial rise, but with no interaction. It is argued that these findings are incompatible with a model that assumes a direct mapping between focus and the initial rise, and that the relatively weak association can nevertheless be informative in a model of interpretation that integrates multiple probabilistic inputs to initial rise occurrence. These findings represent the first quantitative experimental assessment of focus realization in French in a non-corrective context, and establish a previously undocumented link between the initial rise and discourse-level meaning.

Three naming aloud experiments and a lexical decision (LD) experiment used masked priming to index the processing of written Thai vowels and tones. Thai allows for manipulation of the mapping between orthography and phonology not possible in other orthographies, for example, the use of consonants, vowels and tone markers in both horizontal and vertical orthographic positions (HOPs and VOPs). Experiment 1 showed that changing a vowel between prime and target slowed down target naming but changing a tone mark did not. Experiment 1 used an across item-design and a different number of HOPs in the way vowels and tones were specified. Experiment 2 used a within-item design and tested vowel and tone changes for both 2-HOP and 3-HOP targets separately. The 3-HOP words showed the same tone and vowel change effect as Experiment 1, whereas 2-HOP items did not. It was speculated that the 2-HOP result was due to the variable position of the vowel affecting priming. Experiment 3 employed a more stringent control over the 2-HOP vowel and tone items and found priming for the tone changes but not for vowel changes. The final experiment retested the items from Experiment 3 with the LD task and found no priming for the tone change items, indicating that the tone effect in Experiment 3 was due to processes involved in naming aloud. In all, the results supported the view that for naming a word, the development of tone information is slower than vowel information.

Neurogenic foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is diagnosed when listeners perceive speech associated with motor speech impairments as foreign rather than disordered. Speakers with foreign accent syndrome typically have aphasia. It remains unclear how far language changes might contribute to the perception of foreign accent syndrome independent of accent. Judges with and without training in language analysis rated orthographic transcriptions of speech from people with foreign accent syndrome, speech-language disorder and no foreign accent syndrome, foreign accent without neurological impairment and healthy controls on scales of foreignness, normalness and disorderedness.

Control speakers were judged as significantly more normal, less disordered and less foreign than other groups. Foreign accent syndrome speakers’ transcriptions consistently profiled most closely to those of foreign speakers and significantly different to speakers with speech-language disorder. On normalness and foreignness ratings there were no significant differences between foreign and foreign accent syndrome speakers. For disorderedness, foreign accent syndrome participants fell midway between foreign speakers and those with speech-language impairment only. Slower rate, more hesitations, pauses within and between utterances influenced judgments, delineating control scripts from others. Word-level syntactic and morphological deviations and reduced syntactic and semantic repertoire linked strongly with foreignness perceptions. Greater disordered ratings related to word fragments, poorly intelligible grammatical structures and inappropriate word selection. Language changes influence foreignness perception. Clinical and theoretical issues are addressed.

The voicing contrast is neutralized syllable and word finally in Dutch and German, leading to alternations within the morphological paradigm (e.g., Dutch ‘bed(s)’, be[t]-be[d]en, German ‘dog(s)’, Hun[t]-Hun[d]e). Despite structural similarity, language-specific morphological, phonological and lexical properties impact on the distribution of this alternation in the two languages. Previous acquisition research has focused on one language only, predominantly focusing on children’s production accuracy, concluding that alternations are not acquired until late in the acquisition process in either language. This paper adapts a perceptual method to investigate how voicing alternations are represented in the mental lexicon of Dutch and German 3-year-olds. Sensitivity to mispronunciations of voicing word-medially in plural forms was measured using a visual fixation procedure. Dutch children exhibited evidence of overgeneralizing the voicing alternation, whereas German children consistently preferred the correct pronunciation to mispronunciations. Results indicate that the acquisition of voicing alternations is influenced by language-specific factors beyond the alternation itself.

Recent studies on a variety of languages have shown that a speaker’s commitment to the propositional content of his or her utterance can be encoded, among other strategies, by pitch accent types. Since prior research mainly relied on lexical-stress languages, our understanding of how speakers of a non-lexical-stress language encode speaker commitment is limited. This paper explores the contribution of the last pitch accent of an intonation phrase to convey speaker commitment in French, a language that has stress at the phrasal level as well as a restricted set of pitch accents. In a production experiment, participants had to produce sentences in two pragmatic contexts: unbiased questions (the speaker had no particular belief with respect to the expected answer) and negatively biased questions (the speaker believed the proposition to be false). Results revealed that negatively biased questions consistently exhibited an additional unaccented F0 peak in the preaccentual syllable (an H+!H* pitch accent) while unbiased questions were often realized with a rising pattern across the accented syllable (an H* pitch accent). These results provide evidence that pitch accent types in French can signal the speaker’s belief about the certainty of the proposition expressed in French. It also has implications for the phonological model of French intonation.