Production and perception of vowel harmony: Phonological predictors of ratings and on-line adaptations of Russian vowels in Yakut (Sakha) by Lena Vasilyeva A thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics University of Alberta © Lena Vasilyeva, 2017 Abstract This dissertation investigates phonological input predictors of the Russian vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ in on-line adaptations among modern Russian-Yakut bilingual speakers in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation, with a particular focus on the production and perception of vowel harmony. Vowel harmony in Yakut involves backness harmony that requires complete agreement of vowels within words in backness, and rounding harmony, where rounded vowels spread their roundedness feature from left to right, with restrictions regarding the height of the vowels involved. Unlike Yakut, Russian does not have vowel harmony. Previous research indicates that earlier loanwords, adapted when most Yakuts were monolingual, underwent complete vowel harmony and were fully nativized. Thus, considering the context of increasing bilingualism among Yakuts and distinct vowel systems between the source (Russian) and borrowing (Yakut) languages, I examine the most-frequent adaptations of the five Russian vowels and also investigate phonological characteristics of input vowels and words that lead to vowel harmony application and Yakut-likeness in bilingual speakers’ on-line adaptations of input disyllabic borrowed, nonce, and un-borrowed words that contain different combinations and stress variations of the five Russian vowels. Thirty-seven Russian-Yakut bilinguals spontaneously adapted the input words in a frame sentence on-line after reading each word silently in the production task. In addition, the bilingual speakers, as well three Yakut monolinguals, rated Yakut nonce words on Yakut-likeness after hearing each word in recorded audio files. I hypothesized that the input characteristics of vowels and words that include backness and roundness, height, the quality of an individual vowel input, stress, vowel sharedness between the languages (shared and unshared vowels), vowel reduction and the syllables where these features occur, are significant in driving adaptations of the input ii ! vowels. I tested this primary hypothesis using linear mixed-effects model analyses to reveal the input predictors of vowels and words that predict vowel harmony and Yakut-like adaptations. The main findings suggest that vowel harmony is robust in adaptations, especially backness harmony, which appeared in 81.06% of produced words. The phonological input predictors backness, roundness and height are shown to be significant in driving vowel harmony and Yakut- like adaptation: Russian back vowels (which are also rounded) and non-high vowels were better overall triggers of vowel harmony than front and high vowels, respectively. Moreover, harmony was better achieved in harmonic input words sharing the same features than in disharmonic input. Consistent with the native phonology’s rightward directionality of vowel harmony spreading, a first syllable input vowel’s features were important in predicting more uniform vowel adaptations and a general rightward propagation of vowel harmony. The speakers were also generally efficient in judging grammatical and non-grammatical nonce words in perception, however, rounding harmony violations were more tolerated than violations of backness harmony. The most-frequent adaptations of the five input vowels /a, e, i, o, u/ in their unstressed forms as /!, ", i, #, u/ show categorical approximation in adaptation, and the stressed vowels, adapted as /!$, i", i$, u#, u$/, suggest consistent reflection of stressed vowels’ phonetic characteristics. I conclude that phonological characteristics of input vowels and words are essential in predicting vowel harmony and Yakut-likeness in on-line adaptations produced by Russian-Yakut bilinguals. An Optimality Theory (OT) analysis using alignment and faithfulness constraints is shown to account well for the harmonic outputs, but is not necessarily reflective of the less frequent disharmonic adaptations that occurred systematically, contingent on the characteristics of input vowels and words. iii ! Preface This thesis is an original work by Lena Vasilyeva. The research project, of which this thesis is a part, received research ethics approval from the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board 1, Short Study Title “Phonological study of Russian loanwords into Yakut”, Complete Study Title “Yakut loanword phonology with respect to borrowing Russian words”, Study ID: Pro00049053, June 23rd, 2014. I was the principal investigator on this ethics application. iv ! DEDICATION To my father, Vladimir Georgievich Vasilyev (1955-2017) v ! Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the tremendous support of Dr. Chris Golston and my supervisory committee. I would first like to thank my initial supervisor, Dr. Robert Kirchner, for giving me great encouragement to pursue my academic interest in the phonology of Yakut (Sakha) when I started the program, and for providing rewarding intellectual challenges in my beginning years as a doctoral student which shaped my determination and perseverance to further succeed in graduate school. I also thank Robert for giving me suggestions in the optimality- theoretic account of Yakut vowel harmony in my first years of my PhD, the crucial points of which I implemented in the theoretical analyses of the data in this dissertation. I am very grateful to Dr. Benjamin V. Tucker, who has been on my supervisory committee from the beginning, for his constant support. His guidance considerably improved the methodological design of the dissertation and the dissertation overall. My special thanks to my former supervisor Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier for being one of the most immensely encouraging and approachable academic supervisors one can wish for. Thanks to Anne-Michelle’s dedication, I could, for instance, conduct field work in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the summer of 2014 to collect data for the dissertation. Her advice included countless email correspondences from afar with feedback and comments on methodology and data collection. Without Anne-Michelle’s supervision, this project would not have had such a great start right from the beginning. I am also very thankful to Anne-Michelle for facilitating generous funding support for an external transcriber, equipment for transcriptions, and to enable my participation in a transatlantic conference as a doctoral student (SSHRC Insight Grant). I express my profound gratitude to Dr. Juhani Järvikivi who came on board my supervisory committee in my third year. Thanks to Juhani’s positive encouragement and clear and constructive comments on my drafts and project outlines, I throve as a graduate student, and several invaluable experiences, like publishing peer-reviewed journal papers or participating in high-tier academic conferences, became possible. My huge thanks to my supervisor Dr. Anja Arnhold for her wholehearted support and enormous investment in supervising the writing and completion of my dissertation. It would be impossible to list all the detailed guidance Anja has provided me, and I am deeply grateful to her for holding frequent consultations about statistical analyses, and for the countless hours she spent meeting with me. On a personal level, Anja’s respectful and understanding attitude and her vi ! constant positive encouragement have helped me stay motivated in continuing the writing and finishing of my dissertation during the last year of my doctoral studies, which has been an extremely difficult year for my family back home. I am also indebted to Anja for funding my research assistant position in my last year through her Killam Research Fund’s Cornerstone Grant. I would like to thank my fellows from the Department of Linguistics Rebekka Puderbaugh and Dr. Dustin Bowers for being my external transcribers. Their transcriptions, comments and feedback on the production task data have helped me immensely in completing the revisions of the transcriptions. I thank my friends and fellow students Claudia Heinrich and Simon Fung for being amazing “study buddies” during my last year at the university. Thanks to our frequent writing sessions at the Rutherford Library, I rarely experienced the feeling of isolation and solitude that an international student may have while working on a dissertation. I am expressing my deepest gratitude to my family; my father, Vladimir Georgievich; my mother, Marfa Trofimovna; and my younger sisters Iana, Ayuuna, and Diana Vasilyevs. I thank my mother for her unwavering support throughout the years. Thanks to my mother’s support, I could travel home to collect data for this dissertation, and she helped me immensely in recruiting participants for my field work, and I thank her for finding time to accompany me when I went to participants’ homes to collect data. I wholeheartedly thank my father, who had a profound knowledge of the Yakut (Sakha) and Russian languages, for being my language consultant, and for editing and reviewing the words of the production and rating tasks of the dissertation. My big thanks to my sisters Iana, Ayuuna and Diana for providing me selected page copies of some of the literature for the dissertation from libraries in Yakutsk, which were inaccessible to me from here in Edmonton, Alberta. I thank my family,