In order to explore the influence of context on the phonetic design of talk-in-interaction, we investigated the pitch characteristics of short turns (insertions) that are produced by one speaker between turns from another speaker. We investigated the hypothesis that the speaker of the insertion designs her turn as a pitch match to the prior turn…

Real-time use of spoken language is a fundamentally interactive process involving speech perception, speech production, linguistic competence, motor control, neurocognitive abilities such as working memory, attention, and executive function, environmental noise, conversational context, and--critically--the communicative interaction between…

This dissertation explores language as a resource for the formation and expression of ethnic identity among the members of an Asian American college sorority. As a community of practice organized around ethnicity, the sorority provides an excellent site to examine the mutually constitutive relationship of language and ethnic identity. Two features…

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. "The child ate the candies" following after "The child…

Itoman, one of the varieties spoken in the southern part of Okinawa Island, exhibits several tone patterns. Although the tone patterns of Itoman were examined in previous studies (Nakasone ms., Hattori 1959, Oshiro 1963, and Hirayama et al. 1966), they ended at the descriptive level, and no phonological accounts for the surface tone patterns were…

This study develops the hypothesis that the child-specific phenomenon of positional velar fronting can be modeled as the product of phonologically encoded articulatory limitations unique to immature speakers. Children have difficulty executing discrete tongue movements, preferring to move the tongue and jaw as a single unit. This predisposes the…

The areas of "mispronunciation detection" (or "accent detection" more specifically) within the speech recognition community are receiving increased attention now. Two application areas, namely language learning and speech recognition adaptation, are largely driving this research interest and are the focal points of this work.…

Fragmentation between formal and functional approaches to prosodic variation is an ongoing problem in linguistic research. In particular, the frameworks of the Phonetics of Talk-in-Interaction (PTI) and Empirical Phonology (EP) take very different theoretical and methodological approaches to this kind of variation. We argue that it is fruitful to…

Previous work has shown that preterm infants are at higher risk for cognitive/language delays than full-term infants. Recent studies, focusing on prosody (i.e. rhythm, intonation), have suggested that prosodic perception development in preterms is indexed by maturational rather than postnatal/listening age. However, because prosody is heard…

To investigate the interaction between segmental and supra-segmental stress-related information in early word learning, two experiments were conducted with 20- to 24-month-old English-learning children. In an adaptation of the object categorization study designed by Nazzi and Gopnik (2001), children were presented with pairs of novel objects whose…

Research in second language speech has often focused on listeners' accent judgment and factors that affect their perception. However, the topic of listeners' application of specific sound categories in their own perceptual judgments has not been widely investigated. The current study explored how listeners from diverse language backgrounds weighed…

This dissertation investigates how the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Groups are perceived, and the acoustic/phonetics correlates of listeners' judgments. A series of perception experiments have been conducted to scrutinize the following topics--Taiwanese tone neutralization, Tone Sandhi Group (TSG) as a prosodic domain, perceived boundary strength in…

This article contains a literature review of evidence of large prosodic domains that correspond to syntactic units such as a clause or a sentence. In particular, different phonetic nonmanual cues that may relate to clause or sentence boundaries are discussed in detail. On the basis of various ideas and views in the literature, we also describe two…

This study investigates the phonetic implementation of stress in American English compounds by measuring the interaction of stress cues with different intonation patterns. Participants in an experiment produced compounds and phrases such as "greenhouse" and "green house" in different prosodic positions and sentence types to elicit the contrast in…

Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed…