This dissertation aims to extend our knowledge of prosody--in particular, what kinds of information may be conveyed through prosody, which prosodic dimensions may be used to convey them, and how individual speakers differ from one another in how they use prosody. Four production studies were conducted to examine how various factors interact with…

This article presents data from three production experiments investigating the prosodic means of encoding information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put target words either in wide, informational, or…

This dissertation describes the segments and tones of Soyaltepec Mazatec, an Oto-Manguean language of southern Mexico virtually undescribed in the literature with the exception of Pike (1956). The preliminary work done by Pike and subsequent analyses by Goldsmith (1990) and Pizer (1994) are reviewed giving evidence that the system is complex and…

Phonological awareness has been repeatedly reported as important for learning to read in different orthographies. It is important to understand what specific levels of phonological awareness are involved in Chinese and English for Chinese children who learn English-as-a-second-language (ESL). Measures of phonological awareness, word reading,…

First language (L1) attrition research focuses on syntactic and morphological deterioration in environments where L1 "attriters" rarely have contact with their L1, such as immigrants. There is no study that investigates L1 attrition in tones and in contexts where L1 can still be often heard. This study examines this attrition type in…

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 study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naive Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors…

This paper argues that a domain-based approach can be used to explain the complex tonal structure of Xhosa nouns by means of a single H tone spread rule. The argument proposes an H tone-motivated domain structure for every noun type, referred to as Tone Domains (TDs), with the number of TDs determined by the number of lexical H tones in a given…

A phonetic study of vowel devoicing in the Shanghai dialect of Chinese explored the phonetic conditions under which the high, closed vowels and the apical vowel in Shanghai are most likely to become devoiced. The phonetic conditions may be segmental or suprasegmental. Segmentally, the study sought to determine whether a certain type of pre-vocalic…

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…

A study examined the tonal patterns in Komo, a sub-Bantu language of about 200,000 speakers in Zaire. It investigated: (1) the minimal lexical specifications necessary for Komo tones; (2) what sort of tonal alternations exist and how they may be accounted for most simply with rules; (3) how tonal phenomena interact with Komo morphology; and (4) at…

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…

Bini, a language spoken by a million horticulturists in and around Benin City, Nigeria, belongs genealogically to the Edo branch of the Kwa family of the Niger-Congo phylum. Bini dialects differ in their tonemic inventory, which ranges from four to six tonemes per dialect. But all dialects exhibit two morphotonemes--high and low--which perhaps…

Tone-based classification rules for Igbo nouns need modification because: (1) class 1 nouns (monosyllables with high tones) do not, as claimed, operate differently from other terminal high-tone nouns; and (2) class 6 nouns (di-syllabic with downstep tones) can be accounted for within class 2 and class 3 nouns known as HH and LH nouns). The proper…

In a tone language, tonal distinctions between words in sequence can often be analyzed using the same devices that are applied within the word (e.g., downdrift or downstep). However, it is proposed here that Sandawe is a tone language in which the tonal relationships between constituents in clause structure, and between constituents in phrase…