The Ninth Old World Conference in Phonology 2012 Conference

The Ninth Old World Conference in Phonology 2012 Conference Abstracts Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft January 18-21, 2012 Berlin Intonation at the phonology-syntax interface in ‘phrase languages’ Caroline Féry, Goethe University of Frankfurt In the talk I will concentrate on a type of language which has been largely neglected or misclassified in classical typologies of intonation systems, and that I have called ‘phrase languages’ (Féry 2010). I propose that these languages organize the phrasal melodies around boundary tones (or phrasal tones) and not around pitch accents, as is the case in so-called intonation languages (with Germanic languages as prototypes), or around lexical tones as in so-called tone languages (like in Mandarin or in the Bantu languages). The primary text unit of the tonal organization is thus not the word, but the prosodic phrase, a higher domain in the prosodic hierarchy. Lexical accents and pitch accents may be present but are not as important as in intonation languages and tone languages (compare Jun 2005, Ladd 1996/2008 and Gussenhoven 2004 for typologies of intonation primarily based on word melodies). Phrase languages are as diverse as French, Georgian, Hindi, Indian English, Korean and West Greenlandic. After showing what classifies all these languages as one class, I will go into some details of their realization under focus and givenness conditions for the four first in the list. Phrasing cues are very important in these languages, and are sensitive to both syntax and semantics. Results of my own recent research on Hindi and Indian English (with Pramod Pandey), on French (with Fatima Hamlaoui and Sascha Coridun) and on Georgian (with Stavros Skopeteas) will be summed up. It will be shown why it is difficult to assume a conventional pitch accent view for the intonation of these languages. But once phrasing is taken into account, results receive an illuminating interpretation. Mechanisms of phonological learning in adults: the role of features Sharon Peperkamp, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Paris Recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of experimental methods to investigate phonological learning mechanisms. I will report on three studies that examine how adults learn novel phonotactic constraints and phonological alternations. The results suggest that adults rely on subsegmental representations, and, moreover, that these representations are categorical in nature. In other words, adult learners appear to extract featural rather than continuous acoustic representations. While these results do not inform us about the mechanisms of native language acquisition, they do provide insight into the psychological reality of phonological features. Rhythmic Patterns of Prominence in Akan/Twi Jonathan Anderson Department of Linguistics Indiana University In phonological theory, rhythm is described as the appearance of alternating patterns of prominent elements, e.g. alternating stressed syllables. However, metrical patterns are not so apparent in languages without stress or accent. In particular, how rhythm appears in tone languages without stress/accent is poorly understood. This study explores the rhythmic timing patterns of prominent elements in Akan/Twi, a West African tone language thought to be syllable-timed (Obeng, 1987), using the Speech Cycling Task (Cummins & Port, 1998; Port, 2003; Tajima & Port, 2003). In the Speech Cycling Task, speakers are asked to repeat a phrase several times along with a metronome. Prominent elements, such as stressed syllables in English or word-final syllables in Japanese, tend to occur at simple harmonic phases of 1/3, 1/2, and 2/3 of the fixed metronome period. These positions within the period are termed attractors and previous studies have shown that prominent syllables not only have a tendency to align in time with the attractors, but that these syllables also resist temporal displacement (Cummins, 1997; Tajima, 1998; Tajima, Zawaydeh, & Kitahara, 2001). In this work, an experiment was devised to understand the prominence relations between syllables in Akan. As the previous literature suggests, all syllables in Akan have equal prominence in both their phonological representation, as well as their production (Abakah, 2005). The first hypothesis tested whether specific syllables in a phrase will align near 1/2 of the repetition period given a two-beat pattern. The second hypothesis was that syllables aligning with 1/2 would align with a different simple harmonic phase given a three-beat pattern. This is empirically verifiable by checking which syllables exhibit the tendency to occur at simple harmonic phases, which were controlled by manipulating the clicks of the metronome to occur at 1/2 of the period (a two-beat pattern), and 1/3 and 2/3 of the period (a waltz-like pattern). Subjects were instructed to align the first syllable of the phrase with the first click of the metronome. This task forces speakers to align prominent elements within the phrase with the clicks of the metronome, which are fixed to the simple harmonic phases. The data include four speakers asked to repeat a phrase eight times along with a metronome whose rate was fixed. The speech materials included 60 phrases ranging from 4-6 syllables in length and four tone melodies (H, L, HL, and LH). Tone was included as a condition since it also hypothesized that H toned syllables will be more prominent. Results show two patterns of rhythmic entrainment in the two-beat condition. In the first pattern, final syllables of four and five syllable phrases, and the penultimate phrase of six syllable phrases occur near 1/2. In the second pattern, syllables were added to phrases lengthening the phrase by that duration. The phrases in the three-beat condition were repeated with the second pattern. Furthermore, both H and L toned syllables occurred near simple harmonic phases. Implications for the stress-timing/syllable-timing dichotomy and how tonal melodies affect rhythmic patterns are also discussed. Phonological factors outrank frequency effects: Evidence from Greek stress Vasso Apostolouda, Despina Papadopoulou & Anthi Revithiadou Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Research on the phonology of novel/nonce words has shown that phonological grammars encode information on lexical frequencies yielding outputs at frequencies that match the lexical ones (see Zuraw 2000, Hayes & Londe 2006). Interestingly, not all types of phonological information are productively enforced in nonce words. Becker et al. (2011) convincingly argue that speakers apply only phonologically-grounded information and dispose of generalizations that lack such motivation. This finding entails that although the grammar absorbs statistical patterns, speakers do not act as blind frequency matchers (e.g., Frazier 1995, Fodor 1998, Zuraw 2007) by reproducing whatever arbitrary generalization grammar throws at them. In this paper, we provide evidence from Greek stress that speakers make choices about the stress patterns they produce on the basis of what is not accentually marked in their language. This suggests that certain phonological factors can blur or even wipe out frequency effects. Greek stress is not calculated by means of a rule that assigns prominence on some edgemost syllable or on a syllable of a specific type. Stress assignment is rather the result of interaction between morphemes that carry inherent accentual information. In the absence of lexical stress, prominence is assumed to be on the antepenultimate syllable (Malikouti-Drachman & Drachman 1989) due to a three-syllable window restriction. Although it has been reported that APU is not statistically the favorite stress pattern (Revithiadou 1999), there is – to our knowledge – no experimental study to confirm this assumption (see, however, Protopapas et al. (2006), where it is shown that APU is not the preferred stress choice when speakers read out words that lack the orthographic accent diacritic). Acknowledging this gap in the literature of Greek stress, we designed and carried out a production experiment using nonce words as stimuli. Our goal was to investigate which one of the three possible stress patterns, APU, PU or U, would score high in the speakers’ productions. The experimental task involved the production of 150 sentences each one containing a pseudoword. The participants, 32 native speakers of Greek (28 females, 4 males; 21-45 years old; Mean age: 23), were asked to read out 150 SVO sentences, where S was always a pseudoword. Each sentence was introduced with a photo of an unknown item/creature the pseudoword was assumed to denote. The items were controlled for (a) morphological classhood (5 noun classes) and (b) word size (two-, three- & four-syllable words). We collected 4800 items in total which were codified by the experimenters according to speaker, word size and stress pattern. In order to unearth the effect, if any, of the statistical stress patterns of the Lexicon on the speakers’ productions, we culled nouns from the most productive nominal classes, namely -os (masc/fem), -o (neut), -a (fem), -i (neut) and -as (masc) nouns (based on Anastassiadis- Symeonidis’ On-line Reverse Dictionary, http://www.komvos.edu.gr/ dictionaries/dictOnLine/ DictOnLineRev.htm). These nouns were in turn codified according to their size, syllable structure and, of course, stress pattern and morphological class. The comparison of the stress patterns produced by the speakers for the tested inflected words with the patterned frequencies

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