Browsing by Subject "Phonology"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    The acquisition of consonant feature sequences: Harmony, metathesis and deletion patterns in phonological development.
    (2010-12) Gerlach, Sharon Ruth
    This dissertation examines three processes affecting consonants in child speech: harmony (long-distance assimilation) involving major place features as in coat [kok]; long-distance metathesis as in cup [pak]; and initial consonant deletion as in fish [is]. These processes are unattested in adult phonology, leading to proposals for child-specific constraints. Initial consonant deletion in particular is a little-understood phenomenon thought to be idiosyncratic. However, my survey of initial consonant deletion as reported in eight languages reveals systematic deletion patterns affecting continuants and sequences of different consonants. I argue that all of these child-specific processes are tied to the acquisition of consonant sequences. In order to understand the role of these processes in phonological development, I examine consonant acquisition data from a diary study of Grace, an English-acquiring child. I adopt the Bernhardt and Stemberger (1998) variant of Optimality Theory for the analysis since their view of default underspecification, sequences of features, and feature-based approach to sonority permit a unified analysis of harmony, metathesis and initial consonant deletion that explains Grace's trajectory of acquisition as well as the frequency of certain patterns across children. I show that independently motivated constraints governing feature sequences, onset sonority preferences, initial velars, and the tendency to anticipate features within a prosodic domain explain all of these processes, as well as Grace's onset cluster reduction patterns (e.g. snake [seɪk]) and gradual acquisition of different cluster types. Children must learn to produce consonant feature sequences within a word before producing sequences within an onset. Child-specific processes are eliminated as children acquire the speech planning skills necessary to express the contrasts of a mature language, though the constraints remain active in adult phonology. The longitudinal data provide evidence for both constraint demotion and promotion in learning, as well as distinct roles for two types of faithfulness constraints. One mandates the preservation of non-default features that are specified in the underlying representation, while the other evaluates identity of a correspondent segment to any non-default feature associated with a segment. This distinction permits the derivation of initial consonant deletion as a response to positional constraints on features or feature sequences.
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    The acquisition of Spanish vowels by native English-Speaking students in Spanish immersion programs.
    (2010-06) Menke, Mandy R.
    Native-like pronunciation is necessary for membership into some social groups and to be considered a legitimate speaker of a language. Language immersion education aims to develop bilingual individuals, able to participate in multiple global communities, and while the lexical, syntactic, and sociolinguistic development of immersion learners is well documented, their phonological skills are not. This study set out to address this gap by investigating immersion learners' pronunciation of Spanish vowels, a sound class known to lead to a foreign accent, comparing the vowel productions of native English-speaking learners in one-way (foreign language) immersion and two-way (bilingual) immersion programs to those of their native Spanish-speaking peers and their teachers. A total of 85 immersion students participated in this study. A cross-sectional sample of students from each of the program/language groups was taken; students from each of four grade levels (first, third, fifth, and seventh) participated. Students completed an animal picture sorting task in pairs during which their speech was audio and video recorded. Up to twenty tokens of each of the five Spanish vowels, for a possible total of 100 tokens per subject, were isolated and examined via spectrographic analysis in order to measure first and second formant values. The tokens examined for each vowel were balanced for their occurrence in stressed and unstressed syllables. Students also completed a written questionnaire in order to gather data about extralinguistic factors (i.e., attitudes and motivation) that have been shown to influence pronunciation. The findings indicate that the vowel productions of immersion learners differ from those of native Spanish-speaking peers. In general, the vowel space of the learner groups is larger than that of the native speaker peer group. Over time, the number of differences between one-way NES learners and native speakers increase while the number of differences between two-way NES learners and native speakers decrease. This finding suggests that there may be an effect of program model; however, differences in the ethnic background and exposure to Spanish outside of school between the two learner groups may also play a role and thus make it difficult to attribute differences solely to the effect of program model. Differences in attitude between the groups do not reach statistical significance and do not correlate with more native-like vowel pronunciations.
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    Exploring variation in accuracy and contrast for sibilant fricatives at the onset of fricative acquisition
    (2014-04) Nicholson, Hannele Buffy Marie
    Children's speech differs from adult speech in the many ways, including in its phonetic characteristics. A central question for researchers interested in child speech sound acquisition is when and how a child acquires robust adult-like contrasts. In this thesis, I present a protocol for the analysis of the English sibilant fricatives "s" and "sh". Sibilant fricatives are of interest because they are late-acquired sounds that require articulatory-aerodynamic coordination, and are contrastively necessary in multiple languages around the world, English especially. Given the turbulent nature of the sound spectrum of fricative consonants, few agreed upon measures exist. Holliday, Reidy, Beckman and Edwards (In Preparation) propose that peak equivalent rectangular bandwidth is a psychoacoustically appropriate measure for modeling the robustness of phonological contrast between sibilant fricative types. The robustness measures put forth by Holliday et al. are applied to data from the speech of toddlers aged 28-39 months and are discussed.
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    The L2 Acquisition of Buenos Aires Spanish Intonation During a Study Abroad Semester
    (2014-05) Thornberry, Philip
    The present longitudinal study describes and categorizes the primary changes in L2 Spanish intonation over time by 11 learners studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina for one academic semester. Via the autosegmental metrical model of analysis, this dissertation classifies intonational contours for absolute interrogatives and declarative statements at the beginning and end of the semester in a variety of speech styles. It also isolates extralinguistic factors, such as attitudes and degree of social interaction, that promote or hinder acquisition of Spanish intonational norms. Results show that learner absolute interrogative intonation is considerably different from that of their native Buenos Aires Spanish-speaking peers. At the beginning of the semester, the learner contour is classified as L*+H L* H%, which is marked by a final rising F0 movement. This contrasts with the native Buenos Aires Spanish preference L+H* L+¡H* L%, which is most notable for a final falling F0 contour. By the end of the semester, 9 of the 11 learners continue to produce the non-native-like rising intonation in all speech contexts. However, two learners--Eve and Samantha--begin to approximate native norms by producing an interrogative contour characterized here as L*+H L*+H L% in all speech contexts. The learner declarative contour changes very little over time, regardless of speech context. It is analyzed as L*+H L* L%. All 11 learners produce this contour at the beginning and end of the semester. However, Eve and Samantha periodically demonstrate a handful of native-like declarative intonational characteristics when speaking in the informal speech contexts, such as the long fall melody (Kaisse, 2001), early prenuclear peak alignment, and low phrase tones. The analysis of extralinguistic factors reveals that the learners developed generally favorable attitudes towards porteños, which might promote acquisition of native intonational norms. However, learner exposure to the target language was limited by sporadic and superficial interaction with native speakers. Eve and Samantha, the learners who evidenced the most change in intonation over time, stood out from the rest of the learners by developing more robust, supportive relationships with native Spanish-speaking contacts.
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    L2 acquisition of Spanish allophonic and Italian phonemic contrasts
    (2017-05) Mirisis, Christina
    Although Spanish and Italian voiced stops are similar in articulatory (place of articulation) and acoustic (prevoicing) terms, there are important contrasts associated with these sounds in each language that may affect second language (L2) learners’ acquisition. Spanish maintains an allophonic alternation between word-initial voiced stops and intervocalic voiced approximants, which involves a variation in manner of articulation. Italian maintains a phonemic contrast between intervocalic voiced singleton and geminate stops, which involves a variation in duration. Given these differences, the present study investigates whether the sounds associated with the allophonic alternation in Spanish or those associated with the phonemic contrast in Italian are acquired more easily by L2 learners of each language who share the same L1 (American English) via production and perception tasks. Students enrolled in first-, third-, and fourth-year courses, at the same university, in their respective L2 of Spanish or Italian were recruited for the study. 23 L2 Spanish learners, 20 L2 Italian learners, and five native speakers each of Spanish and Italian participated in the study. Production was assessed with a reading task, while perception was assessed with discrimination and identification tests. The results of the acoustic analyses indicate that learners struggle to produce target sounds in a target-like fashion, as L2 Spanish learners produced word-initial [b d g] with significantly less prevoicing than native speakers and they infrequently produced target approximants as such. L2 Italian learners struggled to precisely implement the phonetic cues that distinguish geminate stops from their singleton counterparts (e.g., preceding vowel duration and consonant duration). In addition, correlation analyses revealed that L2 Spanish and L2 Italian learners’ production and perception are related, although not strongly. Therefore, it is possible that learners’ production difficulties have a perceptual basis, as L2 Spanish learners struggled to discriminate voiced approximants from voiced stops and L2 Italian learners struggled to identify the length difference between voiced singleton and geminate stops. This finding constitutes a valuable contribution to L2 Spanish and L2 Italian phonology, as the role of perception as a basis for learners’ production difficulty of these target sounds has been understudied and not well-understood.