The perception of word stress cues in Papuan Malay: a typological perspective and experimental investigation.

Analyses of word prosody have shown that in some Indonesian languages listeners do not make use of word stress cues. The outcomes have contributed to the conclusion that these languages do not have word stress. The current study revisits this conclusion and investigates to what extent speakers of Papuan Malay, a language of Eastern Indonesia, use suprasegmental stress cues to recognize words. Acoustically, this language exhibits predictable word level prominence patterns, which could facilitate word recognition. However, the literature lacks a crucial perceptual verification and related languages in the Trade Malay family have been analysed as stressless. This could be indicative of either regional variation or different criteria to diagnose word stress. To investigate this issue, the current study reviews the literature on which criteria were decisive to diagnose (the absence of) word stress in Indonesian and Trade Malay. An acoustic analysis and a gating task investigate the usefulness of Papuan Malay stress cues for word recognition. Results show that Papuan Malay listeners are indeed able to use suprasegmental stress cues to identify words. The outcomes are discussed in a typological perspective to shed light on how production and perception studies contribute to stress diagnosis cross-linguistically.

Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?

Creole languages have generally not figured prominently in cross-linguistic studies of word-prosodic typology. In this paper, we present a phonological analysis of the prosodic system of Lung’Ie or Principense (ISO 639-3 code: pre), a Portuguese-lexifier creole language spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Lung’Ie has produced a unique result of the contact between the two different prosodic systems common in creolization: a stress-accent lexifier and tone language substrates. The language has a restrictive privative H/Ø tone system, in which the /H/ is culminative, but non-obligatory. Since rising and falling tones are contrastive on long vowels, the tone must be marked underlyingly. While it is clear that tonal indications are needed, Lung’Ie reveals two properties more expected of an accentual system: (i) there can only be one heavy syllable per word; (ii) this syllable must bear a H tone. This raises the question of whether syllables with a culminative H also have metrical prominence, i.e. stress. However, the problem with equating stress with H tone is that Lung’Ie has two kinds of nouns: those with a culminative H and those which are toneless. The nouns with culminative H are 87% of Portuguese origin, incorporated through stress-to-tone alignment, while the toneless ones are 92% of African origin. Although other creole languages have been reported with split systems of “accented” vs. fully specified tonal lexemes, and others with mixed systems of tone and stress, Lung’Ie differs from these cases in treating African origin words as toneless, a quite surprising result. We consider different analyses and conclude that Lung’Ie has a privative /H/ tone system with the single unusual stress-like property of weight-to-tone.

Word Prosody in Lung’Ie: One System or Two?

Creole languages have generally not figured prominently in cross-linguistic studies of word-prosodic typology. In this paper, we present a phonological analysis of the prosodic system of Lung’Ie or Principense (ISO 639-3 code: pre), a Portuguese-based creole language spoken in São Tomé and Príncipe. Lung’Ie has produced a unique result of the contact between the two different prosodic systems common in creolization: a stress-accent lexifier and tone language substrates. The language has a restrictive privative H/Ø tone system, in which the /H/ is culminative, but non-obligatory. Since rising and falling tones are contrastive on long vowels, the tone must be marked underlyingly. While it is clear that tonal indications are needed, Lung’Ie reveals two properties more expected of an accentual system: (i) there can only be one heavy syllable per word; (ii) this syllable must bear a H tone. This raises the question of whether syllables with a culminative H also have metrical prominence, i.e. stress. However, the problem with equating stress with H tone is that Lung’Ie has two kinds of nouns: those with a culminative H and those which are toneless. The nouns with culminative H are 87% of Portuguese origin, incorporated through stress-to-tone alignment, while the toneless ones are 92% of African origin. Although other creole languages have been reported with split systems of “accented” vs. fully specified tonal lexemes, and others with mixed systems of tone and stress, Lung’Ie differs from these cases in treating African origin words as toneless, a quite surprising result. We consider different analyses and conclude that Lung’Ie has a privative /H/ tone system with the single unusual stress-like property of weight-to-tone.

North Africa and the Middle East

This chapter provides an overview of the prosodic systems of languages spoken in North Africa and the Middle East, taking in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, plus the Arabian Peninsula, and the Middle East (but excluding Kurdish). The survey sketches the nature and scope of typological variation—in respect to prosody—across the whole of the Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan language families, addressing, within the limits of the existing literature: word prosody, prosodic phrasing, melodic structure, and prosodic expression of meaning (sentence modality, focus, and information structure). The survey is organized around language sub-families, reporting what is known about the different aspects of prosody for each sub-family, together with a brief discussion of priorities for future research.

Iberia

This chapter describes the main features of the prosodic systems of Basque, Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) model. In its word prosody, Basque comprises pitch-accent and stress systems, while the other languages differ in the distribution of final and antepenultimate lexical stress. A discussion of prosodic phrasing and phrasal prominence patterns reveals that accentual phrases play a crucial role in Basque, but not in Catalan, Spanish, or Portuguese, which differ in their higher prosodic structure. Melodic patterns vary in the complexity and distribution of pitch events as well as in their ability to express sentence modality and focus in collaboration with lexical and syntactic markers. The division of labour between prosodic and morphosyntactic encodings varies greatly, with Basque displaying a heavier syntactic load and the other languages having a more varied melodic functionality. Some unresolved research issues are highlighted.

The Acquisition of Word Prosody

This chapter provides a state-of-the-art overview regarding the acquisition of three aspects of word prosody: lexical tone, pitch accent, and word stress. It also addresses word-learning studies where these prosodic features have been manipulated. Across these features, infants show evidence for perceptual tuning in the course of their first year: they prefer their native language patterns over non-native and infrequently encountered ones. Yet, it may take infants longer to use such receptive knowledge of word prosody for word learning, word recognition, and word production, and the timing of accurate utilization depends on the specific tones, pitch accents, and word-stress patterns. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the gaps in our knowledge, which involve longitudinal development and insight into the developmental triggers, the relationship between perception and production studies, and the interaction of word prosody with other domains of linguistics.

Word Prosody in Second Language Acquisition

The production and perception of a second language (L2) will be affected by any differences between native language (L1) and L2 lexical stress and lexical tone. This chapter first discusses L1 effects on the perception of L2 words that differ in stress, comparing the explanatory power of phonological (stress-parameter-based) and phonetic (cue-based) approaches for L2 learners’ performance in word recognition. Equally, it discusses L1 effects on the production of stress in L2 words, from both a phonological and a phonetic perspective. The discussion then moves on to the L2 acquisition of lexical tone, focusing on differences in the way native speakers and L2 learners make use of lower-level acoustic-phonetic and higher-level linguistic information, their weighting of tonal cues (pitch height and pitch direction), and the role of contextual phonetic and prosodic information. Special attention is paid to major typological differences between L1 and L2 (non-tonal vs. tonal; level tones vs. contour tones). Finally, the efficacy of short-term auditory training in the acquisition of new tonal categories is evaluated. Throughout, the chapter addresses the influence of factors such as age of acquisition and proficiency.

L2 Perception and Production of Japanese Lexical Pitch

Adults are known to have difficulties acquiring suprasegmental speech that involves pitch (f0) in a second language (L2) (Graham & Post, 2018; Hirata, 2015; Wang, Spence, Jongman & Sereno, 1999; Wong & Perrachione, 2007). Previous research has suggested that the perceived similarity between L1 and L2 phonology may influence how easily segmental speech is acquired, but this notion of ‘similarity’ may also apply to suprasegmental speech (So & Best, 2010; Wu, Munro & Wang, 2014). In this paper, the L2 acquisition of Japanese lexical pitch was assessed under a ‘Suprasegmental Similarity Account’, which is a theoretical framework inspired by previous models of segmental and suprasegmental speech (Best & Tyler, 2007; Flege, 1995; Mennen, 2015) to account for the L2 acquisition of word prosody. Eight adult native speakers of Japanese and eight adult English-native advanced learners of Japanese participated in a perception and production study of Japanese lexical pitch patterns. Both groups performed similarly in perception, but non-native speakers performed significantly worse in production, particularly for ‘unaccented’ Low–High–High patterns. These findings are discussed in light of the ‘Suprasegmental Similarity Account’.

Morae in Estonian. A reply to Natalja Kuznetsova’s paper “Estonian word prosody on the Procrustean bed of morae”

This reply to Natalja Kuznetsova highlights many questionable interpretations and outcomes, ten serious errors and five minor inaccuracies in her polemical paper “Estonian word prosody on the Procrustean bed of morae” (2018). The proposed list of errors includes misinterpretations of Estonian language data, faulty citations and biased conclusions. Kokkuvõte. Külli Prillop: Moorad eesti keeles. Vastus Natalja Kuznetsova artiklile “Eesti sõnaprosoodia moorade Prokrustese sängis”. Vastus Natalja Kuznetsovale toob välja mitu küsitavat tõlgendust ja tulemust, kümme tõsist viga ja viis väiksemat ebatäpsust tema poleemilises artiklis “Estonian word prosody on the Procrustean bed of morae”. Esitatud loend vigadest sisaldab eesti keeleandmete väärtõlgendusi, vigaseid tsitaate ja kallutatud järeldusi.