While tonal systems have typically been classified as "pitch accent" or "true tonal", there is growing evidence that systems instead have a variety of features which vary across languages, rather than falling into discrete categories. These category labels have been used widely in literature about the languages of New Guinea,…

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…

This article extends Optimality Theoretic studies to the research on second language tone phonology. Specifically, this work analyses the acquisition of identical tone sequences in Mandarin Chinese by adult speakers of three non-tonal languages: English, Japanese and Korean. This study finds that the learners prefer not to use identical lexical…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

This dissertation studies the perception of tones in Thai, and aims to contribute to a formal characterization of speech perception more generally. Earlier work had argued that perception of tones involves retrieval of some abstract "autosegmental" representation provided by the phonology, while another line of work had argued for the…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

This dissertation examines floating tones and tone gesture deactivation in Sierra Juarez Zapotec (SJZ), and provides an Optimality Theoretic account of tonal spreading and placement using insights from Articulatory Phonology. While the data portion of the dissertation is drawn from SJZ, the approach has broader implications for theories of tonal…

This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform…

The current study examined how form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) as output enhancement facilitated second language (L2) perception of Mandarin tones at both the phonetic and phonological levels by 41 Cantonese learners of Mandarin. Two experimental groups, FFI only and FFI-CF, received a 90-min FFI treatment…

We report two sets of experiments showing that the large individual variability in language learning success in adults can be attributed to neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, cognitive, and perceptual factors. In the first set of experiments, native English-speaking adults learned to incorporate lexically meaningfully pitch patterns in words. We…

A DESCRIPTION OF THE GBAYA PEOPLES LIVING IN THE DISTRICT OF BOSSANGOA IN THE NORTHWESTERN PART OF THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC IS PRESENTED IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF THE GBAYA LANGUAGE. (THE LANGUAGE IS SPELLED VARIOUSLY BEA, GBEA, AND GBAYA.) IN THREE SECTIONS, THE FIRST PART OF THE TEXT DEALS WITH THE PHONOLOGY AND…

THIS STUDY OF THE CANTONESE PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM IS A CASE STUDY OF THE PHONOLOGICAL COMPONENT OF A GENERATIVE GRAMMAR. ATTEMPTS ARE MADE IN CHAPTER III TO SOLVE SOME OLD PROBLEMS CONNECTED WITH THE ANALYSIS OF CANTONESE WITHIN THIS NEW THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK. MOST OF THE PROBLEMS ARE PSEUDO-PROBLEMS, IN THE SENSE THAT THEY POSE DIFFICULTIES ONLY…

An analysis of tone in language begins with the observation that the structural approach taken in segmental phonology, analyzing complex tones in terms of sequences of level tones, is not necessarily appropriate with tone languages. A different approach is proposed, a "dynamic-tone" theory that represents tone contours entirely in terms…

The purpose of this beginning text in Ewe is to provide the student with an introduction to the structure of the Ewe language and "reasonable practice" in speaking. It is intended to be taught with the assistance of a native speaker of Ewe. Linguistic terminology is minimal. Suggested teaching time ranges from two semesters of class meetings of…

Twenty texts in the Chinese dialect of Shanghai city are presented as a tool for those familiar with some dialect of Chinese who are learning this variety. The texts, recorded as spontaneous speech, were originally collected for grammatical analysis and have been revised somewhat for print form. They are arranged in approximate order of…