Syllable Tone Research Articles

Pitch Variation Skills in Cantonese Speakers With Apraxia of Speech After Stroke: Preliminary Findings of Acoustic Analyses.

Literature on apraxia of speech (AOS) in Chinese speakers is sparse compared to the English literature. This study aims to examine the pitch variation skills of Cantonese adults with AOS poststroke in terms of perceptual tone accuracy, acoustic fundamental frequency (fo) changes, and repetition durations on items with different syllable structures, lexical status, and tone syllables in various positions in a sequencing context. Six Cantonese adults with AOS poststroke (AOS group), six adults without AOS poststroke (nAOS group), and six healthy controls (HC group) performed the tone sequencing task (TST), which was adapted from oral diadochokinetic tasks, with three different tone syllables. Tone accuracy, fo values across 10 time points, and acoustic repetition durations were compared within and between the groups. The AOS group produced significantly lower tone accuracy and different fo changes on the three Cantonese tone syllables compared with the control groups and significantly longer repetition durations than the HC group. The AOS group showed more difficulty with the tone syllables with the consonant-vowel structure, while a priming effect was observed on the T2 (high-rising) syllables with lexical meanings. A unique lowering of fo in the final syllable of the trisyllabic items was observed only in the AOS group. The AOS group showed degraded pitch variation skills. The effects of the three linguistic elements were discussed. Future investigations are called for to adapt the TST in other tonal languages to determine if degraded pitch variation skills are present in other tonal language speakers with AOS.

Appropriate Syllable Length and its Fixation of Consecutive CV Syllables－3- Syllable and 4-Syllable Words May as be the Basis for Mastering Special Syllable－

<p>正確、流利的使用日語乃是所有外國人學習日語的目標。然而，以中文為母語的日語學習者（以下簡稱CNJ）對於五十音無法熟記等問題亦時有所聞。此問題恐與CNJ發話時日語的CV音節過長有關。該如何有效解決此問題乃當務之急。因此，本研究是以6名的CNJ與3名東京腔的日語母語者(以下簡稱JN)為對象，運用日語音聲的特徵以輕聲無義詞來指導，加以確認CNJ是否可利用連續的短CV音節發出日語適當的音節長。通過本實驗研究，比較CNJ（指導前後）和JN的差異，針對單詞、詞語、短句發話中的3音節和4音節無義詞，分析其是否可正確區分CV音節長度。研究結果顯示，指導前CNJ的3音節與4音節的音節長度分布與JN之間具有顯著差異，且音節的高低傾向與JN的音長伸縮率也呈現出差異性。然而，經筆者指導後，CNJ與JN之間的差異已不復見。換言之，我們認為與JN相近之CV音節長度，如在日語音節長度記憶的時間範圍內，則可視為連續短CV音節的日語發話基礎已確立。由此可見，以連續輕聲音節為主的無義詞為基準，並記住日語連續短CV音節長度，足以產出適當的音節長度，得知通過一連串的指導可盡早學習到日語的正確發音。日語連續短CV音節發話基礎的確立，是為解決CNJ與JN的CV音節長度認知差異的有效方法。另，掌握對立長音節間的語音差異，對日語特殊節拍的學習效果亦具一定成效。</p> <p> </p><p>Accurate and fluent linguistic performance is the goal of language acquisition for foreign learners of Japanese. However, some native Chinese learners (hereinafter referred to as CNJ) complain that they cannot memorize the Japanese syllabary. This is related to the excessively long CV syllables of Japanese produced by CNJ, and prompt resolution of this issue is required.In this research, from the viewpoint of whether it is possible to reproduce the appropriate syllable length by short CV syllables using the meaningless words of 0 tone syllables. As a quasi-experimental study, using the three-syllable and four-syllable test words, including words, phrases, and short sentences by 6 CNJs and 3 native speakers of Tokyo dialect (hereafter referred to as JN) to conduct an experiment.As a result, the syllable length of CNJ (before instruction) for both three-syllable and four-syllable words was significantly more than JN and was also shown in the difference in expansion and contraction rate of syllable length from JN. But after instruction, no significant difference observed, which is close to JN. It shows that the basis of Japanese utterances based on consecutive short CV syllables has already been established.It was confirmed that it is possible to produce an appropriate syllable length by recalling the points of continuous short CV syllables of Japanese, based on meaningless words with continuous o tone syllables. Establishment of the base of utterances by consecutive short CV syllables of Japanese is a standard for resolving discrepancies in CV syllable lengths and grasping the phonetic differences between long syllables. It is also expected to serve as a basis for mastering special syllable.</p> <p> </p>

Disyllabic hypocoristics in Chilean Spanish: a stratal OT analysis

Abstract Hypocoristics have received considerable interest from phonologists in recent decades, particularly within the Optimality-theoretic literature. While most of these analyses have been situated in parallelist OT, I claim that this architectural choice entails hidden complexities. It is cross-linguistically common for multiple hypocoristics to be formed from a single proper noun, e.g., Matthew → Matt/Matty. In this case, parallelist OT must resort to co-phonologies to avoid ranking paradoxes, which results in significant analytical complexity. By contrast, I argue in this paper that a stratal analysis is crucial for capturing multiple patterns of Hypocoristic Formation (HF) within a single architecture. I present here data of disyllabic hypocoristics from Standard Chilean Spanish. These hypocoristics are derived from the proper nouns by means of two separate anchoring sites: to the left edge of the full name, or to prominence in the full name, i.e., the tonic syllable. In addition, hypocoristics may be prosodically- or morphologically-driven: they may solely be formed by truncating the material of the proper noun, or, in the latter case, there may also be additional suffixal material provided. These data, therefore, lend themselves to a four-way categorisation. I show that this categorisation can be fully accounted for within a stratal architecture, and without the need for additional co-phonologies. Within the analysis, I locate each of the anchoring sites within the lexical phonology: edge-anchoring occurs at the stem level, along with syllabification and stress assignment, while prominence-anchoring occurs at the word level. In this way, the input to edge-anchoring at the stem level comprises a string of segments, while the input to prominence-anchoring at the word-level contains prosodic units up to the foot, which permits word-level HF to anchor to prominence. I further posit that prosodic- and morphologically-driven HF are caused through the passing of hypocoristic morphemes from the morpho-syntax to the phonology. Purely prosodic HF is triggered through a null or covert morpheme, while morphological HF triggered by an overt one. The hypocoristic morphemes themselves are stored as diacritics in the proper nouns’ lexical entries. Furthermore, the constraints that select the hypocoristic forms as optimal are sensitive to the presence of this hypocoristic morpheme, which is reflected in tableaux through indexing. When a hypocoristic morpheme is present in the input of a proper noun to a particular stratum, these highly-ranked indexed constraints select a corresponding hypocoristic form as optimal. If the hypocoristic morpheme is absent, these constraints do not assign violations, and the proper noun is instead (vacuously) found optimal. This analysis thus unifies two distinct patterns of HF in one phonological grammar through the inclusion of indexed-constraints and the serial derivation in a constraint-based architecture.

The Effects of Different Brain Regions on fNIRS-based Task-state Detection in Speech Imagery.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) based on speech imagery can decode users' verbal intent and help people with motor disabilities communicate naturally. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a commonly used brain signal acquisition method. Asynchronous BCI can response to control commands at any time, which provides great convenience for users. Task state detection, defined as identifying whether user starts or continues covertly articulating, plays an important role in speech imagery BCIs. To better distinguish task state from idle state during speech imagery, this work used fNIRS signals from different brain regions to study the effects of different brain regions on task state detection accuracy. The imagined tonal syllables included four lexical tones and four vowels in Mandarin Chinese. The brain regions that were measured included Broca's area, Wernicke's area, Superior temporal cortex and Motor cortex. Task state detection accuracies of imagining tonal monosyllables with four different tones were analyzed. The average accuracy of four speech imagery tasks based on the whole brain was 0.67 and it was close to 0.69, which was the average accuracy based on Broca's area. The accuracies of Broca's area and the whole brain were significantly higher than those of other brain regions. The findings of this work demonstrated that using a few channels of Broca's area could result in a similar task state detection accuracy to that using all the channels of the brain. Moreover, it was discovered that speech imagery with tone 2/3 tasks yielded higher task state detection accuracy than speech imagery with other tones.

A Mandarin Tone Recognition Algorithm Based on Random Forest and Feature Fusion †

In human–computer interaction (HCI) systems for Mandarin learning, tone recognition is of great importance. A brand-new tone recognition method based on random forest (RF) and feature fusion is proposed in this study. Firstly, three fusion feature sets (FFSs) were created by using different fusion methods on sound source features linked to Mandarin syllable tone. Following the construction of the CART decision trees using the three FFSs, modeling and optimization of the corresponding RF tone classifiers were performed. The method was tested and evaluated on the Syllable Corpus of Standard Chinese (SCSC), which is a speaker-independent Mandarin monosyllable corpus. Additionally, the effects were also assessed on small sample sets. The results show that the tone recognition algorithm can achieve high tone recognition accuracy and has good generalization capability and classification ability with unbalanced data. This indicates that the proposed approach is highly efficient and robust and is appropriate for mobile HCI learning systems.

The influence of co-speech gesture presence on the timing of F0 peaks in a tonal language

The timing of co-speech gestures has been shown to correlate with the location of pitch peaks in speech in several non-tonal languages. While little research has examined this relationship in tonal languages, existing work suggests that pitch peak timing does not show the same synchronous alignment with manual gesture timing. In this paper, we examine whether the presence of a gesture can have an influence on timing of pitch peaks in Medʉmba, a tonal Grassfields Bantu language. Manual gesture data were analyzed from spontaneous interview speech of six Medʉmba speakers. In line with prior findings on tonal languages, manual gesture apexes and pitch peaks did not align, and gesture-accompanied vowels were not realized with higher or more dynamic pitch profiles (though they were realized with longer duration and greater intensity; ps < .01). The findings did indicate, however, that f0 peaks—particularly for high, falling, and low tone syllables—were realized earlier in gesture-accompanied vowels than non gesture-accompanied vowels (p < .05). We interpret these findings in the context of an integrated model of speech and manual gesture in which tonal gestures and manual gestures are both crucially timed to vowels, but timed to occur sequentially with one another.

Decoding lexical tones and vowels in imagined tonal monosyllables using fNIRS signals

Objective. Speech is a common way of communication. Decoding verbal intent could provide a naturalistic communication way for people with severe motor disabilities. Active brain computer interaction (BCI) speller is one of the most commonly used speech BCIs. To reduce the spelling time of Chinese words, identifying vowels and tones that are embedded in imagined Chinese words is essential. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been widely used in BCI because it is portable, non-invasive, safe, low cost, and has a relatively high spatial resolution. Approach. In this study, an active BCI speller based on fNIRS is presented by covertly rehearsing tonal monosyllables with vowels (i.e. /a/, /i/, /o/, and /u/) and four lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese (i.e. tones 1, 2, 3, and 4) for 10 s. Main results. fNIRS results showed significant differences in the right superior temporal gyrus between imagined vowels with tone 2/3/4 and those with tone 1 (i.e. more activations and stronger connections to other brain regions for imagined vowels with tones 2/3/4 than for those with tone 1). Speech-related areas for tone imagery (i.e. the right hemisphere) provided majority of information for identifying tones, while the left hemisphere had advantages in vowel identification. Having decoded both vowels and tones during the post-stimulus 15 s period, the average classification accuracies exceeded 40% and 70% in multiclass (i.e. four classes) and binary settings, respectively. To spell words more quickly, the time window size for decoding was reduced from 15 s to 2.5 s while the classification accuracies were not significantly reduced. Significance. For the first time, this work demonstrated the possibility of discriminating lexical tones and vowels in imagined tonal syllables simultaneously. In addition, the reduced time window for decoding indicated that the spelling time of Chinese words could be significantly reduced in the fNIRS-based BCIs.

Flexibility and evolution of cue weighting after a tonal split: an experimental field study on Tamang

Abstract We conducted a perception experiment in the field to examine the synchronic consequences of a tonal split in Risiangku Tamang (Tibeto-Burman). Proto-Tamang was a two-tone language with three series of plosives and two series of continuants. The merger of its continuants provoked a split of the original two tones into four, two high and two low, which combine pitch and phonation features. The quasi-merger of the voiced and voiceless plosives left sporadic remnants of initial plosive voicing in low tone syllables. A previous production study has shown that speakers use pitch and phonation features concomitantly to distinguish high from low tones, while producing initial plosive voicing only marginally with low tones. The present perception study establishes the preeminence of the pitch cue, but also confirms the effective use of the two older cues in tone identification. An apparent-time analysis shows the phonation cue to be less used by younger speakers, in keeping with the historical evolution. The use of the residual voicing of plosives, instead of decreasing with younger speakers, is shown to increase. This result could be explained by an increased contact of the young generation with Nepali, a toneless Indo-Aryan language with a four-way initial plosive contrast.

Examining Individual Differences in Singing, Musical and Tone Language Ability in Adolescents and Young Adults with Dyslexia.

In recent years, evidence has been provided that individuals with dyslexia show alterations in the anatomy and function of the auditory cortex. Dyslexia is considered to be a learning disability that affects the development of music and language capacity. We set out to test adolescents and young adults with dyslexia and controls (N = 52) for their neurophysiological differences by investigating the auditory evoked P1–N1–P2 complex. In addition, we assessed their ability in Mandarin, in singing, their musical talent and their individual differences in elementary auditory skills. A discriminant analysis of magnetencephalography (MEG) revealed that individuals with dyslexia showed prolonged latencies in P1, N1, and P2 responses. A correlational analysis between MEG and behavioral variables revealed that Mandarin syllable tone recognition, singing ability and musical aptitude (AMMA) correlated with P1, N1, and P2 latencies, respectively, while Mandarin pronunciation was only associated with N1 latency. The main findings of this study indicate that the earlier P1, N1, and P2 latencies, the better is the singing, the musical aptitude, and the ability to link Mandarin syllable tones to their corresponding syllables. We suggest that this study provides additional evidence that dyslexia can be understood as an auditory and sensory processing deficit.

문법 단위로서 사고 단위에 기반을 둔 초등 예비교사의 영어 문장 끊어 읽기와 발음 능력 향상

This study aims to investigate how primary pre-service teachers use pauses appropriately to read English sentences with thought groups as grammatical units, and to examine how well they pronounce focus words within thought groups. Eleven participants took a pre-test and post-test, in which they read 25 English sentences with thought groups, and they pronounce focus words prominently within thought groups. The results indicated the following: 1) They put thought group boundaries in more sentences appropriately in the post-test than in the pre-test, showing a statistically meaningful difference (p<0.001). 2) Their pronunciation also improved in that they placed prominence on more accurate focus words in the post-test than in the pre-test, by stressing and lengthening the tonic syllables of focus words, which also revealed a statistically significant difference (p<0.001).

Investigating the Lexical Representation of Mandarin Tone 3 Phonological Alternations.

Phonological alternations pose challenges for models of spoken word recognition in how surface information is mapped onto stored representations in the lexicon. In the current study, an auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiment was conducted to investigate the alternating representations of Mandarin Tone 3 in both half-third and third tone sandhi contexts. In Mandarin, a full Tone 3 (213) is reduced to an abridged tone (21) when followed by Tone 1, Tone 2, or Tone 4 (half-third tone sandhi), and Tone 3 is replaced by Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (third tone sandhi). In the half-third sandhi block, disyllabic targets with a half-third (21) or full-third (213) tone FIRST syllable and a Tone 2 (35) or Tone 4 (51) second syllable were preceded by either a half-third prime, a full-third prime, or a control prime. In the third tone sandhi block, third-tone sandhi disyllabic targets with a half-third or full-third SECOND syllable were preceded by either a half-third prime, a full-third prime, or a control prime. Results showed that both half-third and full-third primes elicited significantly faster reaction times relative to the control Tone 1 condition. The size of the facilitation was not influenced by prime condition, target frequency, targets' first syllable tone or targets' second syllable tone. These data suggest that Mandarin T3 may be a more abstract tone and stored as the first syllable for both types of sandhi words.

Phonological aspects in premature children aged 12 to 25 months

Objetivo: analisar os aspectos fonológicos empregados na fala de crianças prematuras. Método: estudo observacional e descritivo da produção de fala espontânea em onze crianças prematuras durante seis meses de avaliações. Foram acompanhadas entre os anos de 2014 a 2017, ambos os sexos, nascidas com idade gestacional entre 24 e 35 semanas, independente do peso, sendo avaliadas entre 12 e 25 meses de idade. Inicialmente, consultou o prontuário do bebê, em seguida procedeu-se a anamnese fonoaudiológica e análise de fala espontânea entre criança e mãe em situação lúdica, seguindo-se os preceitos éticos, com o consentimento e a assinatura dos responsáveis. Foram computados em tabelas os totais das produções verbais e quantificado o preenchimento segmental vocálico e consonantal em sílabas tônica e átonas. Resultados: dentre os participantes, Sujeito 2 apresentou-se defasado em relação às demais crianças quanto ao total de palavras e ao preenchimento consonantal e vocálico em todas as posições silábicas. Sujeitos 1, 8, 10 e 11 destacaram-se nos segmentos consonantais presentes na pré-tônica, tônica e pós-tônica, resultando em palavras mais inteligíveis. Conclusão: a sílaba tônica foi a detentora de maior preenchimento segmental. A distinção entre segmentos consonantal e vocálico favoreceu a produção de novas palavras, refletidas no aumento do vocabulário.

Bilingual language dominance and contrastive focus marking: Gradient effects of K’ichee’ syntax on Spanish prosody

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:This study examines prosodic contrastive focus marking in the Spanish of 24 simultaneous K’ichee’-Spanish bilinguals via the following research questions: (1) How do K’ichee’-Spanish bilinguals prosodically mark contrastive focus in Spanish? (2) Is there evidence of K’ichee’ influence in Spanish prosody and is this possible K’ichee’ influence correlated with the language dominance of the bilinguals?Design/methodology/approach:Participants produced utterances in both broad and contrastive focus conditions via a question-answer task.Data and analysis:Tonic syllables of 1638 target words were analyzed according to L- and H-tone alignment and the rise of the pitch contour. Data were analyzed via linear mixed-effects models according to pragmatic condition (categorical effect) and language dominance (continuous effect).Findings/conclusions:Results indicate gradient effects of language dominance of possible K’ichee’ influence. Spanish-dominant bilinguals tend to prosodically mark contrastive focus to a greater degree than K’ichee’-dominant bilinguals. It is proposed that this may be due to the different focus marking strategies between K’ichee’ and Spanish. K’ichee’ primarily marks contrastive focus syntactically whereas it is much more common in Spanish to only mark contrastive focus prosodically.Originality:This study employs a modified version of the question-answer task, which uses video clips to elicit the data in order to include participants with low literacy rates and control the elicitations. It also provides one of the first analyses of intonation in Guatemalan Spanish and the task and data allow for direct comparisons with the K’ichee’ data produced by these same bilinguals.Significance/implications:These results parallel those of similar studies: among bilinguals, the syntactic contrastive focus marking strategy of one language may affect the prosodic contrastive focus marking strategy of their other language. Additionally, the use of language dominance as a continuous variable expands our understanding of inter-speaker variation in such studies.

Chinese Tone Recognition Based on 3D Dynamic Muscle Information

To advance the study of lip-reading recognition in accordance with Chinese pronunciation norms, we carefully investigated Mandarin tone recognition based on visual information, in contrast to that of the previous character-based Chinese lip reading technique. In this paper, we mainly studied the vowel tonal transformation in Chinese pronunciation and designed a lightweight skipping convolution network framework (SCNet). And, the experimental results showed that the SCNet was sensitive to the more detailed description of the pitch change than that of the traditional model and achieved a better tone recognition effect and outstanding antiinterference performance. In addition, we conducted a more detailed study on the assistance of the deep texture information in lip-reading recognition. We found that the deep texture information has a significant effect on tone recognition, and the possibility of multimodal lip reading in Chinese tone recognition was confirmed. Similarly, we verified the role of the SCNet syllable tone recognition and found that the vowel and syllable tone recognition accuracy of our model was as high as 97.3%, which also showed the robustness of our proposed method for Chinese tone recognition and it can be widely used for tone recognition.

Do Explicit Instruction and High Variability Phonetic Training Improve Nonnative Speakers’ Mandarin Tone Productions?

AbstractThis study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers’ Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n= 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n= 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n= 40) took part in a multiday Mandarin‐like artificial language learning task. Participants were asked to repeat a syllable–tone combination immediately after hearing it. Half of all participants were exposed to speech from 1 talker (low variability) while the other half heard speech from 4 talkers (high variability). Half of the L1 English participants were given daily explicit instruction on Mandarin tone contours, while the other half were not. Tone accuracy was measured by L1 Mandarin raters (n= 104) who classified productions according to their perceived tonal category. Explicit instruction of tone contours facilitated L1 English participants’ production of rising and falling tone contours. High variability input alone had no main effect on participants’ productions but interacted with explicit instruction to improve participants’ productions of high‐level tone contours. These results motivate an L2 tone production training approach that consists of explicit tone instruction followed by gradual exposure to more variable speech.

Stress clash in Spanish, Catalan, and Friulian from a prosodic perspective

Abstract In several languages, two stresses cannot appear adjacently in the speech chain, and a variety of solutions have been found to be used to resolve this disfavored juxtaposition. According to various different authors, a common strategy for solving stress clash is the non-realization of the first stress and, typically, a transfer of all stress parameters to the pre-tonic syllable. This study aims to describe how stress clash is solved in three Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan, and Friulian) and two sentence-types (broad focus statements and information-seeking yes-no questions). The first two languages behave similarly, insofar as length and loudness are not stress-supporting parameters, and F0 maintains the general patterns of the type of sentence. Friulian stands out because length is the main stress parameter and tonic syllables are significantly longer, even when there is a stress clash. F0 also follows the general sentence type pattern, with one exception: declarative sentences in NP1, where the pre-tonic syllable is always higher than its corresponding tonic.

Diversification in trophic morphology and a mating signal are coupled in the early stages of sympatric divergence in crossbills

AbstractUnderstanding the mechanisms generating diversity in mating signals is critical to understanding the process of speciation. One mechanism of mating signal diversification occurs when phenotypes that experience divergent ecological selection also affect the production of mating signals, resulting in a coupling between ecological diversification and mating signal diversification. Here, we present evidence that rapid diversification in bill size has resulted in the diversification of some components of song structure in a young adaptive radiation of seed-eating finches (red crossbill, Loxia curvirostra complex). Specifically, we find that larger-billed ecotypes sing songs with lower minimum frequencies, lower syllable repetition rates and greater vocal deviation (i.e. lower performance) than smaller-billed ecotypes for pure tonal syllables. In contrast, bill size was not correlated with maximum frequency or frequency bandwidth, and we found no relationship between bill size and any song parameters in buzzy syllables. Furthermore, we found no evidence for a relationship between the degree of bill size divergence and the potential for song discrimination between sympatric ecotypes. Because bill size is correlated with some features of pure tonal syllables (which appear to be most important for courtship in crossbills) in crossbill song, our results suggest that there was an early-evolving link between ecological and mating signal diversification that may have influenced the rapid evolution of reproductive isolation between sympatric ecotypes.

Breathy voice and low-register: A case of trading relation in Shanghai Chinese tone perception?

In Shanghai Chinese as well as many other Wu dialects, breathy voice is a well-documented accompaniment of the low-register tone syllables with obstruent as well as sonorant onsets. But Shanghai Chinese is rapidly changing and the breathy voice associated with low-register tones tends to disappear in young speakers' productions. In this study, we asked whether breathy voice is nevertheless still perceived and whether it pushes tone identification toward low-register tones. We conducted forced-choice tone identification tests on young native listeners of Shanghai Chinese, using low-high register tone continua-from tone T3 (23) to tone T2 (34)-imposed on base syllables with either modal or breathy voice quality, and beginning with various onset consonants. We used continua constructed from either naturally produced or synthesized syllables. Our results show that breathy voice does bias tone identification responses toward the low-register tone T3. This result held for both synthesized and natural stimuli, except for the /m/-onset stimuli derived from naturally produced syllables. We propose that the phonetic change at issue-loss of breathiness in production-is not due to misperception but reflects the ever-stronger influence of Standard Mandarin Chinese. In other words, this particular case of sound change seems to be led by production rather than perception. It remains an open question whether this kind of sound change is only determined by sociolinguistic factors (here, the dominance of Mandarin Chinese) or is independently motivated by phonetic and/or phonological factors.

A prosódia de perguntas e asserções: um estudo situado de espanhol no Brasil

Neste trabalho, descreve-se a entoação (F0 e duração) de perguntas totais e parciais e de suas asserções correspondentes em enunciados lidos em espanhol por quatro informantes: duas brasileiras, falantes de espanhol como L2, e duas espanholas, falantes de espanhol como L1. Para a descrição e análise dos dados, partimos de trabalhos realizados para o português brasileiro (MORAES, 1998; CUNHA, 2000; MORAES, 2006, 2008; BARBOSA, 2012; FROTA, 2013) e para o espanhol (NAVARRO TOMÁS, 1944; SOSA, 1999; CANTERO, 2002; HIDALGO NAVARRO, 2006; ESTEBAS VILAPLANA, PRIETO, 2009; FERREIRA DE SÁ, 2013; SILVA, 2016). Os resultados mostram que o padrão mais frequente para enunciados do tipo pergunta total apresenta movimento ascendente na região prenuclear e na região nuclear. Nas perguntas parciais o movimento melódico predominante é descendente. As asserções se caracterizam por contorno prenuclear ascendente com pico geralmente na sílaba tônica ou postônica prenuclear, queda da F0 ao longo do enunciado e acento nuclear num nível médio ou baixo seguido de F0final baixa. No que diz respeito ao parâmetro duração, em enunciados do tipo pergunta total e pergunta parcial, as 4 informantes apresentam padrão semelhante: encurtam as sílabas da região prenuclear e a pretônica nuclear e alongam a tônica e a postônica nucleares. Nos enunciados assertivos, observa-se que as informantes brasileiras encurtam as pretônicas e postônicas prenucleares e alongam as tônicas. As informantes espanholas, por sua vez, alongam pretônicas e tônicas prenucleares e encurtam as postônicas. Na região nuclear as 4 informantes apresentam padrão similar, com alongamento das tônicas e postônicas.

English adaptation in Mandarin A-not-A constructions

A-not-A refers to a Mandarin reduplication construction where the underlying form /RED-pu-A/ contains a reduplication of the first syllable in A. In this study I investigate the kinds of adaptations that occur when an English word serves as the base A in code-switching speech. Since the complex onsets and most codas allowed in English are illegal in Mandarin syllables, the reduplicated part is expected to adapt to Mandarin phonotactics to some degree. I ran a production experiment where 20 native Mandarin-speakers were asked to produce A-not-A constructions with 55 mono- and multi-syllabic English words. Results from the experiment showed varied adaptation methods in syllable structure and tones. To model the results, I used the Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar (MaxEnt) with weighted constraints on syllable structure markedness and base-reduplicant faithfulness.