Linguistics: “Current Issues in Phonetics: An Homage to Peter Ladefoged”
Session Coordinator:
Benjamin Schmeiser
Department of Foreign Languages
benschmeiser@ucdavis.edu
“Effects of Phonological
Priming on Production in Russian-English Bilinguals”
Russian-English bilinguals’
production of three different phonemes was measured using speech analyzer
software before and after priming for Russian and English phonology. Production
of English words was expected to assimilate towards
phonological realizations consistent with the Russian language after priming
for Russian. Differences in production of the Russian and English variants can
be measured acoustically testing formant frequency, length and amplitude. Priming
has shown to affect production of several phonemes differently. Production of
similar phonemes has shown less susceptibility to priming while production of
different phonemes has shown significant shifts in
articulation. Production of vowels was also shown to shift after priming
suggesting that we process phonemes differently depending on their similarity
to our native phonemes. These results support findings by Flege
(1991) who suggests that we have more difficulties acquiring phonemes that are
similar to our L1 phonology rather than those that are different. These results
also yield support for the perceptual assimilation model developed by C. Best
(1995) who explains the phenomenon of acquiring similar phonemes before
dissimilar ones by suggesting that bilinguals assimilate similar sounds onto
their existing cognitive phonetic representations while creating new phonetic
representations for those sounds that are different. From these findings a
sequence of phoneme acquisition is proposed based largely on the learner’s L1.
Timur V. Ten
Northeastern
AHAPXIYA@aol.com
“The Prosodic and Segmental
Considerations of Svarabhakti Vowel Durational
Variability in Spanish Complex Onsets”
It has long been noted that Spanish complex onsets containing /R/ in second position typically exhibit an intervening vowel-like element, or svarabhakti vowel (henceforth, SV): pronto [p«R] 'soon', otro [t«R] 'other', fresco [f«R] 'cool, fresh', negro [Ä«R] 'black' (Lenz, 1892; Navarro Tomás, 1918; Gili Gaya, 1921; Malmberg, 1965; Quilis, 1988). In an early phonetic study, Gili Gaya (1921) measured the duration of SVs in Peninsular Spanish, based on speakers' pronunciations of isolated words with /CR/ appearing in different positions. He found that the duration of the intervening SV is highly variable, even in the same word repeated several times by the same speaker. The present study expands upon Gili Gaya's (1921) original phonetic investigation by testing seven prosodic and segmental hypotheses with empirical data from a corpus of twenty-nine speakers of Spanish who were recorded reading a short passage. All /CR/ tokens were extracted and analyzed spectrographically, yielding duration measurements for both the SV and the rhotic constriction. Preliminary results from single-factor ANOVAs reveal significant effects at p<.05 for the five hypotheses based on segmental factors, but not for those based on prosodic factors. Lastly, I examine this study’s findings in theoretical terms by presenting an analysis based on Articulatory Phonology (Browman and Goldstein, 1986, et seq.) in which I discuss how the perception of the SV changes according to gestural overlap within a Phase Window (Byrd, 1996).
Benjamin Schmeiser
benschmeiser@ucdavis.edu