This dissertation investigates intuitions about Spanish syllable structure and whether or not word segmentation strategies are affected by these syllabic intuitions. The study utilizes monolingual Spanish speakers, L1 Spanish speakers who are L2 learners of English and L1 English speakers who are L2 learners of Spanish. For Spanish syllabic…

Language has a rhythmic structure, but little is known about the mechanisms that underlie how it is planned. Traditional models of language production assume that metrical and segmental planning occur independently and in parallel (Roelofs & Meyer, 1998). We test this claim in three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants completed an…

The acquisition of literacy skills is a complex and multi-faceted process that begins long before typical school-based literacy instruction. The present study sought to examine and expand research regarding the independent and interactive contributions of neuropsychological development, movement, play, and music on the development of literacy…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

This dissertation examines the development of the internal structure of the Korean syllable by adult Korean learners whose native language is English. Prior research has identified the prominence of the body constituent in Korean and the rime constituent in English. The current study focuses on the acquisition of the body unit by English speakers…

Second language (L2) phonological acquisition involves learning novel target-language sounds, variable forms of sounds that arise in different phonological contexts, and any phonotactic constraints that govern their appearance. Interlanguage (IL) grammars must adapt to represent sounds and constraints that are novel to the native language (L1)…

Many languages have processes which lengthen or shorten a vowel or consonant. In this dissertation, I concentrate on Open Syllable Lengthening, Closed Syllable Shortening, Monosyllabic Lengthening and Trochaic Lengthening, and present a formal model which captures these lengthenings and shortening as the insertion, deletion or reassignment of a…

This dissertation examines the influence of L2 orthographic representation on the phonological development of American English speakers learning Korean, addressing specifically the syllabification and resyllabification of Korean intervocalic obstruents and the intervocalic liquid phoneme. Although Korean and English both employ alphabetic writing…

Speech utterances are phoneme sequences but may not always be represented as such in the brain. For instance, electropalatography evidence indicates that as speaking rate increases, gestures within syllables are manipulated separately but those within consonant clusters act as one motor unit. Moreover, speech error data suggest that a syllable's…

Literature on speech rhythm has been focused on three major questions: whether languages have rhythms that can be classified into a small number of types, what the criteria are for the membership in each class, and whether the perceived rhythmic similarity between languages can be quantified based on properties found in the speech signal. Claims…

Individuals with acquired phonological dyslexia experience difficulty associating written letters with their corresponding sounds, especially in pseudowords. Several studies have attempted to improve reading in this population by training letter-to-sound correspondence, general phonological skills, or a combination of these approaches; however,…

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 is a reconstruction of Proto-Ersuic, the ancestor language of Lizu, Tosu, and Ersu, three closely related languages spoken in southwestern Sichuan which are generally considered to be part of the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman. To date, no in-depth historical work has been carried out on these languages. Approximately 800 lexical items are…

Previously published studies on the role of amplitude envelope in lexical tone perception focused on Mandarin only. Amplitude envelope was found to co-vary with fundamental frequency in Mandarin lexical tones, and amplitude envelope alone could cue tone perception in Mandarin which uses primarily tone contour for phonemic tonal contrasts. The…

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…