A perception-induced /t/-to-/k/ sound change: evidence from a cross-linguistic study.

John Ohala claimed that the source of sound change may lie in misperceptions which can be replicated in the laboratory. We tested this claim for a historical change of /t/ to /k/ in the coda in the Southern Min dialect of Chaoshan. We conducted a forced-choice segment identification task with CVC syllables in which the final C varied across the segments [p t k ʔ] in addition to a number of further variables, including the V, which ranged across [i u a]. The results from three groups of participants whose native languages have the coda systems /p t k ʔ/ (Zhangquan), /p k ʔ/ (Chaoshan) and /p t k/ (Dutch) indicate that [t] is the least stably perceived segment overall. It is particularly disfavoured when it follows [a], where there is a bias towards [k]. We argue that this finding supports a perceptual account of the historically documented scenario whereby a change from /at/ to /ak/ preceded and triggered a more general merger of /t/ with /k/ in the coda of Chaoshan. While we grant that perceptual sound changes are not the only or even the most common type of sound change, the fact that the perception results are essentially the same across the three language groups lends credibility to Ohala's perceptually motivated sound changes.

The Sequence Recall Task and Lexicality of Tone: Exploring Tone "Deafness".

Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of "pitch accent languages," another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task (SRT), which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal contrasts to test the hypothesis that high performance in a tonal SRT indicates the lexical status of tone. An additional question concerned the extent to which accuracy scores depended on phonological and phonetic properties of a language's tone system, like its complexity, the existence of an experimental contrast in a language's phonology, and the phonetic salience of a contrast. The results suggest that a tonal SRT is not likely to discriminate between tonal and non-tonal languages within a typologically varied group, because of the effects of specific properties of their tone systems. Future research should therefore address the first hypothesis with participants from otherwise similar tonal and non-tonal varieties of the same language, where results from a tonal SRT may make a useful contribution to the typological debate on word prosody.

Foundations of Intonational Meaning: Anatomical and Physiological Factors.

Like non-verbal communication, paralinguistic communication is rooted in anatomical and physiological factors. Paralinguistic form-meaning relations arise from the way these affect speech production, with some fine-tuning by the cultural and linguistic context. The effects have been classified as "biological codes," following the terminological lead of John Ohala's Frequency Code. Intonational morphemes, though arguably non-arbitrary in principle, are in fact heavily biased toward these paralinguistic meanings. Paralinguistic and linguistic meanings for four biological codes are illustrated. In addition to the Frequency Code, the Effort Code, and the Respiratory Code, the Sirenic Code is introduced here, which is based on the use of whispery phonation, widely seen as being responsible for the signaling and perception of feminine attractiveness and sometimes used to express interrogativity in language. In the context of the evolution of language, the relations between physiological conditions and the resulting paralinguistic and linguistic meanings will need to be clarified.

Stress "Deafness" Reveals Absence of Lexical Marking of Stress or Tone in the Adult Grammar.

A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on the consonant contrast, while two language groups, Dutch and Japanese, significantly outperformed the three other language groups (French, Indonesian and Persian) on the prosodic contrast. Since only Dutch and Japanese words have unpredictable stress or accent locations, the results are interpreted to mean that stress "deafness" is a property of speakers of languages without lexical stress or tone markings, as opposed to the presence of stress or accent contrasts in phrasal (post-lexical) constructions. Moreover, the degree of transparency between the locations of stress/tone and word boundaries did not appear to affect our results, despite earlier claims that this should have an effect. This finding is of significance for speech processing, language acquisition and phonological theory.

Phonological markers of information structure: an fMRI study.

In this fMRI study we investigate the neural correlates of information structure integration during sentence comprehension in Dutch. We looked into how prosodic cues (pitch accents) that signal the information status of constituents to the listener (new information) are combined with other types of information during the unification process. The difficulty of unifying the prosodic cues into overall sentence meaning was manipulated by constructing sentences in which the pitch accent did (focus-accent agreement), and sentences in which the pitch accent did not (focus-accent disagreement) match the expectations for focus constituents of the sentence. In case of a mismatch, the load on unification processes increases. Our results show two anatomically distinct effects of focus-accent disagreement, one located in the posterior left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA6/44), and one in the more anterior-ventral LIFG (BA 47/45). Our results confirm that information structure is taken into account during unification, and imply an important role for the LIFG in unification processes, in line with previous fMRI studies.

Language-specificity in the perception of paralinguistic intonational meaning.

This study examines the perception of paralinguistic intonational meanings deriving from Ohala's Frequency Code (Experiment 1) and Gussenhoven's Effort Code (Experiment 2) in British English and Dutch. Native speakers of British English and Dutch listened to a number of stimuli in their native language and judged each stimulus on four semantic scales deriving from these two codes: SELF-CONFIDENT versus NOT SELF-CONFIDENT, FRIENDLY versus NOT FRIENDLY (Frequency Code); SURPRISED versus NOT SURPRISED, and EMPHATIC versus NOT EMPHATIC (Effort Code). The stimuli, which were lexically equivalent across the two languages, differed in pitch contour, pitch register and pitch span in Experiment 1, and in pitch register, peak height, peak alignment and end pitch in Experiment 2. Contrary to the traditional view that the paralinguistic usage of intonation is similar across languages, it was found that British English and Dutch listeners differed considerably in the perception of "confident," "friendly," "emphatic," and "surprised." The present findings support a theory of paralinguistic meaning based on the universality of biological codes, which however acknowledges a language-specific component in the implementation of these codes.

Explaining attitudinal ratings of Dutch rising contours: morphological structure vs. the frequency code.

In this article, two hypotheses were tested to explain attitudinal ratings like SURPRISE, SUGGESTION, REMINDER etc. of four rising nuclear contours observed in a Dutch question corpus and described as (a) H*L H%, (b) H* H%, (c) L*H H% and (d) L* H%. According to one hypothesis, the middle tones in (a) and (c) should be parcelled out, such that their absence produces contours (b) and (d), respectively, predicting communality of meaning within (a, c) that excludes (b, d). That is, (b, d) could be viewed as undershot variants of (a, c), with undershoot expressing a shade of meaning different from that of the fully realised pitch accents. This hypothesis was not confirmed by the data, though. The other hypothesis was based on the concept of the 'frequency code', which associates high/rising F(0) values with non-assertive behaviour and appeared to provide a much better model to predict listeners' ratings.