The acoustics of word-initial and word-internal voiced stops in Somali

This article seeks to determine the acoustic correlates of gemination in Standard Somali (Afroasiatic, Cushitic), in particular whether closure duration is the primary acoustic correlate distinguishing singleton and geminate stops, with immediate consequences for the analysis of word-initial strengthening. We provide an acoustic analysis of word-initial and word-internal voiced singletons as well as of their geminate counterparts on the basis of a production experiment conducted with four native speakers. Three temporal and four non-temporal acoustic properties of /b d ɡ/ and /bb dd ɡɡ/ are examined and systematically compared (closure duration, release burst duration, vowel duration; and closure amplitude, release amplitude, presence of a release burst, (de)voicing). We argue that the opposition between singleton and geminate voiced stops is primarily realized as the manner contrast approximant [β̞ ð̞ ɣ̞] vs. stop [b d ɡ]. Word-initially, Somali exhibits various peculiarities that are reminiscent of the cross-linguistically attested phenomenon of domain-initial strengthening. This article provides the first study of this phenomenon in Somali. We establish that word-initial /b d ɡ/ and word-medial /bb dd ɡɡ/ share the same closure duration, release burst duration, and vowel duration within the Prosodic Word. They also have a similar closure amplitude, and voicing properties. Moreover, the acoustic properties of word-initial /b d ɡ/ remain constant, and do not depend on their position in the prosodic hierarchy. On the basis of these results, the article also aims at providing new insights in the phonological representation of Somali geminates and word boundaries, and thus contributes to the understanding of word-initial strengthening in Somali.

Pitch Accent Distribution and Focus Structure in Taifi Arabic: A Production Study

Prosodic encoding of focus in Taifi Arabic is not yet fully understood. A recent production study found significant acoustic differences between syntactically identical sentences with information focus, contrastive focus and without focus. This paper presents results from a production experiment investigating whether information and contrastive focus have prosodic effects on the pitch-accent distributions. Using question-answer paradigms, 16 native speakers of Taifi Arabic were asked to read three target sentences in different focus conditions. Results reveal that every content word is pitch-accented in utterances with and without focus. However, there are very few cases (23.12%) in which the post-focus words are deaccented. The largest percentage of deaccentuation was observed in the utterances with initial contrastive focus. The results show that focus structures in Taifi Arabic show both deaccentuation and post-focus compression. Therefore, the prosodic realization of focus in Taifi Arabic is different from their counterparts in other Arabic dialects such as Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. These findings have an important implication for both the prosodic typology and focus typology.

From ‘No, she does’ to ‘Yes, she does’: Negation processing in negative yes–no questions by Chinese users of English

In response to negative yes–no questions (e.g., Doesn’t she like cats?), typical English answers (Yes, she does/No, she doesn’t) peculiarly vary from those in Mandarin (No, she does/Yes, she doesn’t). What are the processing consequences of these markedly different conventionalized linguistic responses to achieve the same communicative goals? And if English and Mandarin speakers process negative questions differently, to what extent does processing change in Mandarin–English sequential bilinguals? Two experiments addressed these questions. Mandarin–English bilinguals, English and Mandarin monolinguals (N = 40/group) were tested in a production experiment (Expt. 1). The task was to formulate answers to positive/negative yes–no questions. The same participants were also tested in a comprehension experiment (Expt. 2), in which they had to answer positive/negative questions with time-measured yes/no button presses. In both Expt. 1 and Expt. 2, English and Mandarin speakers showed language-specific yes/no answers to negative questions. Also, in both experiments, English speakers showed a reaction-time advantage over Mandarin speakers in negation conditions. Bilingual’s performance was in-between that of the L1 and L2 baseline. These findings are suggestive of language-specific processing of negative questions. They also signal that the ways in which bilinguals process negative questions are susceptible to restructuring driven by the second language.

Effect of Pre and Post Emergence Herbicides Application on Economics of Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum L.)

An experiment was conducted during kharif 2020 at Post Graduate Research Farm, Agronomy Section, College of Agriculture, Dhule to study the effect of pre and post emergent herbicides application on economics of pearl millet production. Experiment consisted of nine treatments namely weedy check (T1), weed free (T2), atrazine @ 500 g/ha PoE (T3), 2,4-D (Dimethyl amine) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T4), 2,4-D (Na Salt) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T5), atrazine @ 500 g/ha PE fb 2,4-D (Dimethyl amine) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T6), atrazine @ 500 g/ha PE fb 2,4-D (Na Salt) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T7), pendimethalin 750 g/ha PE fb 2,4-D (Dimethyl amine) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T8), pendimethalin 750 g/ha PE fb 2,4-D (Na Salt) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T9) laid out in randomized block design with three replications. Among the herbicidal treatments, grain yield (kg/ha) and straw yield (kg/ha) was observed better with application of pendimethalin @ 750 g/ha PE fb 2,4-D (Na Salt) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T9). Among the chemical weed management treatments, application of pendimethalin @ 750 g/ha PE fb 2,4-D (Na Salt) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T9) observed higher gross and net monetary returns (₹/ha). However, the gross and net monetary returns (₹/ha) were maximum under weed free treatment but lower B:C ratio as compared to sequential application of pendimethalin @ 750 g/ha PE fb 2,4-D (Na Salt) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T9) and pendimethalin @ 750 g/ha PE fb 2,4-D (Dimethyl amine) @ 500 g/ha at 25-30 DAS PoE (T8) due to higher cost for labour weeding.

An alternatives account of 'most’ and 'more than half’

While 'most' and 'more than half' are generally assumed to be truth-conditionally equivalent, the former is usually interpreted as conveying greater proportions than the latter. Previous work has attempted to explain this difference in terms of pragmatic strengthening or variation in meanings. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation that keeps the truth-conditions equivalence. We argue that the difference in typical sets between the two expressions emerges as a result of two previously independently motivated mechanisms. First, the two expressions have different sets of pragmatic alternatives. Second, listeners tend to minimize the expected distance between their representation of the world and the speaker's observation. We support this explanation with a computational model of usage in the Rational Speech Act framework. Moreover, we report the results of a quantifier production experiment. We find that the difference in typical proportions associated with the two expressions can be explained by our account.

Correction by Focus: Cleft Constructions and the Cross-Linguistic Variation in Phonological Form

A challenging issue of cross-linguistic variation is that the same syntactic construction may appear in different arrays of contexts depending on language. For instance, cleft constructions appear with contrastive focus in English, but in a larger array of contexts in French. A part of the cross-linguistic variation may be due to prosodic differences, since prosodic possibilities determine the array of focus structures that can be mapped onto one and the same syntactic configuration. In the present study, we compare languages with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German), with languages that do not use this prosodic strategy (French, Mandarin Chinese). In a speech production experiment, we examine the prosodic realization of contrastive focus and identify prosodic reflexes of focus in all languages. The presence of different phonetic reflexes of focus suggests that – anything else being equal – the same syntactic constructions should be possible in the same array of contexts. In an acceptability study with written questionnaires, we examined the felicity of cleft constructions in contexts licensing a focus within the cleft clause. This focus structure is orthogonal to the preferred focus structure of cleft constructions and can appear in cases of second-occurrence foci (in contexts of correction). The obtained judgments reveal a distinction between languages with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German) and languages with other types of reflexes of focus (French, Chinese): languages of the former type have an advantage in using cleft constructions with a focus within the cleft clause, which shows that the array of contexts of using clefts in English and German is not a proper subset of the array of contexts applying to the same constructions in French and Chinese. The obtained differences can be explained by the role of prosodic devices and corroborate the view that prosodic reflexes of focus have different semantic-pragmatic import: it is easier to establish a focus structure that is orthogonal to the syntax in a language with flexible nuclear-accent placement (English, German); this does not hold for prosodic correlates of focus that reinforce the articulation of prosodic constituents (French) or the articulation of lexical tones (Chinese).

Morphological generalization in heritage speakers: The Turkish aorist

Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language production, the first study of this kind for heritage Turkish. We specifically examined morphological generalization processes in the Turkish aorist which – unusual for this language – includes both regular and irregular forms. A written elicited-production experiment containing nonce verbs with varying degrees of similarity to existing verbs was administered to Turkish HS and native monolingually-raised Turkish speakers (MS). We also explored how well a formal model that was trained on a large lexical corpus of Turkish matches the human speakers’ performance. Our main finding is that HS employ both similarity-based and rule-based mechanisms for morphological generalization of the Turkish aorist, with subtle differences to the way these mechanisms are applied by Turkish MS.

Aspects of New Zealand English Intonation and Its Meanings: an Experimental Investigation of Forms and Contrasts

<p>The first aim of this thesis was to examine the form of New Zealand English intonation. The results of the first series of experiments illustrated several distinctive features of NZE intonation and the preferential tonal use within this language variety. The results from the first experiment suggests that NZE intonation can be characterised as having a narrow pitch range within the phrase and a wide pitch range at the end of the phrase in relation to British English. The findings in the second analysis illustrate that tonal composition, not sentence type affects the pitch range that NZE speaker uses. In addition to pitch range preferences, NZE speakers were also found to prefer an H*L-L% nuclear tonal composition on statements and an L*L-H% for two types of questions when conversational cues were not required by the task type. The second aim of the thesis was to define the tonal features which may adequately describe the semantic contrasts used in this variety. Five experiments were carried out with this aim in mind. The results revealed that NZE listeners use the height of pitch target values when interpreting the meaning of intonation and that the heights of three tonal constituents would be useful in notating the semantic contrasts in this language variety. First, the pitch accent target is used in this variety to indicate speaker involvement, whereby higher (H*) or later (L+H*) pitch accent targets indicate a greater degree of involvement than lower (L*) or earlier targets (H*), respectively. This claim was supported by a production experiment (Chapter 5) in which speakers were asked to convey contrasting meanings on identical utterances. The results were such that higher and later pitch peaks were produced to convey concern, emphasis and an impressed attitude, while lower and earlier pitch accent peaks indicated an absence of these three meanings. Further support for this claim was provided in a perception experiment (Chapter 7), which investigated how listeners interpret conversational markers indicating discourse completeness. The results show that NZE listeners interpret higher H* targets as indicating speaker involvement and, subsequently, listener-oriented turn cues. However, a non-emphatic H*, or a high pitch accent which is lower in pitch than a preceding high pitch accent, does not convey such cues. Second, the boundary target is used to contrast continuation with high phrase-final targets and finality with low phrase-final targets in NZE. This assertion was supported by a perception experiment (Chapter 6) which examined categorical boundaries determined by the boundary tone height. The results suggest that there is at least one categorical boundary at the IP-Final position, which is marked by the pitch movement to the boundary target from the preceding H*. In addition, the semantic contrast of the boundary target height was illustrated in two experiments. First, a production experiment (Chapter 5) illustrated how NZE speakers indicate conversational continuation cues and concern with high boundaries whereas low boundaries indicated conversational cessation cues and a lack of concern. A separate perception experiment (Chapter 7) showed that NZE listeners interpret higher boundary targets as speaker continuation cues and listener-oriented speaking cues whereas lower boundary targets again indicated conversational cessation cues for the speaker and to the listener. Third, the phrase accent may prove useful in distinguishing a further semantic contrast used in this language variety, with a level pitch movement from H* to the IP-Final boundary target categorised with the H% stimuli (suggested in Chapter 6) while the distinction between H-L% and L-L% may be best defined as a pitch movement which does not fall to the F0 minimum and a movement which does fall to this low value (Chapter 5). Although the existence of a phrase accent could not be proved in this thesis, the results illustrate support for this tonal feature.</p>

Aspects of New Zealand English Intonation and Its Meanings: an Experimental Investigation of Forms and Contrasts

<p>The first aim of this thesis was to examine the form of New Zealand English intonation. The results of the first series of experiments illustrated several distinctive features of NZE intonation and the preferential tonal use within this language variety. The results from the first experiment suggests that NZE intonation can be characterised as having a narrow pitch range within the phrase and a wide pitch range at the end of the phrase in relation to British English. The findings in the second analysis illustrate that tonal composition, not sentence type affects the pitch range that NZE speaker uses. In addition to pitch range preferences, NZE speakers were also found to prefer an H*L-L% nuclear tonal composition on statements and an L*L-H% for two types of questions when conversational cues were not required by the task type. The second aim of the thesis was to define the tonal features which may adequately describe the semantic contrasts used in this variety. Five experiments were carried out with this aim in mind. The results revealed that NZE listeners use the height of pitch target values when interpreting the meaning of intonation and that the heights of three tonal constituents would be useful in notating the semantic contrasts in this language variety. First, the pitch accent target is used in this variety to indicate speaker involvement, whereby higher (H*) or later (L+H*) pitch accent targets indicate a greater degree of involvement than lower (L*) or earlier targets (H*), respectively. This claim was supported by a production experiment (Chapter 5) in which speakers were asked to convey contrasting meanings on identical utterances. The results were such that higher and later pitch peaks were produced to convey concern, emphasis and an impressed attitude, while lower and earlier pitch accent peaks indicated an absence of these three meanings. Further support for this claim was provided in a perception experiment (Chapter 7), which investigated how listeners interpret conversational markers indicating discourse completeness. The results show that NZE listeners interpret higher H* targets as indicating speaker involvement and, subsequently, listener-oriented turn cues. However, a non-emphatic H*, or a high pitch accent which is lower in pitch than a preceding high pitch accent, does not convey such cues. Second, the boundary target is used to contrast continuation with high phrase-final targets and finality with low phrase-final targets in NZE. This assertion was supported by a perception experiment (Chapter 6) which examined categorical boundaries determined by the boundary tone height. The results suggest that there is at least one categorical boundary at the IP-Final position, which is marked by the pitch movement to the boundary target from the preceding H*. In addition, the semantic contrast of the boundary target height was illustrated in two experiments. First, a production experiment (Chapter 5) illustrated how NZE speakers indicate conversational continuation cues and concern with high boundaries whereas low boundaries indicated conversational cessation cues and a lack of concern. A separate perception experiment (Chapter 7) showed that NZE listeners interpret higher boundary targets as speaker continuation cues and listener-oriented speaking cues whereas lower boundary targets again indicated conversational cessation cues for the speaker and to the listener. Third, the phrase accent may prove useful in distinguishing a further semantic contrast used in this language variety, with a level pitch movement from H* to the IP-Final boundary target categorised with the H% stimuli (suggested in Chapter 6) while the distinction between H-L% and L-L% may be best defined as a pitch movement which does not fall to the F0 minimum and a movement which does fall to this low value (Chapter 5). Although the existence of a phrase accent could not be proved in this thesis, the results illustrate support for this tonal feature.</p>