In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

In response to requests I have often got as to how one approaches a tone language, I present a personal view of the three stages involved, starting from scratch and arriving at an analysis: Stage I: Determining the tonal contrasts and their approximate phonetic allotones. Stage II: Discovering any tonal alternations ("morphotonemics").…

This dissertation is a grammar of Rena (ISO bez), a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Tanzania by approximately 600,000 people. Bena is largely undocumented, and though aspects of Bena grammar have been described, there is no usable, detailed treatment of the Bena language. Therefore the goal of this dissertation is provide the first detailed…

This study suggests revisions to the segmental and tonal phonology of Kabiye following a reanalysis of consonants, vowels, and tones in the speech of 7 male native speakers. Acoustic investigations are also included to illustrate some phonetic aspects of segments and tone. Data were elicited through three speech styles--wordlists, short phrases,…

Lexical-tone languages use fundamental frequency (F0/pitch) to convey word meaning. About 41.8% of the world's languages use lexical tone (Maddieson, 2008), yet those systems are under-studied. I aim to increase our understanding of speech-sound inventory organization by extending to tone-systems a model of vowel-system organization, the Theory of…

This paper reviews the evidence that Proto-Niger-Congo was a tone language with only two level tones and seeks to find the evidence that will explain how some of the descendant languages have more than two tones. In particular it shows how synchronic tone rules in Cama and consonant correspondences between Cama and Yoruba suggest a new factor in…

A study investigated the validity of three theories in predicting the structure of language tone systems containing level tones. The theories include the following: that (1) phonetic elements are arranged so they are maximally separated in a fixed phonetic space; (2) a system with a larger number of phonetic elements will use a larger phonetic…