Stem similarity modulates infants' acquisition of phonological alternations.

Phonemes have variant pronunciations depending on context. For instance, in American English, the [t] in pat [pæt] and the [d] in pad [pæd] are both realized with a tap [ɾ] when the -ing suffix is attached, [pæɾɪŋ]. We show that despite greater distributional and acoustic support for the [t]-tap alternation, 12-month-olds successfully relate taps to stems with a perceptually-similar final [d], not the dissimilar final-[t]. Thus, distributional learning of phonological alternations is constrained by infants' preference for the alternation of perceptually-similar segments. Further, the ability to relate variant surface forms emerges between 8- and 12-months. Our findings of biased learning provide further empirical support for a role for perceptual similarity in the acquisition of linguistically-relevant categories. We discuss the implications of our findings for phonological theory, language acquisition and models of the mental lexicon.

Effects of consonantal constrictions on voice quality.

A speech production experiment with electroglottography investigated how voicing is affected by consonants of differing degrees of constriction. Measures of glottal contact [closed quotient (CQ)] and strength of voicing [strength of excitation (SoE)] were used in conditional inference tree analyses. Broadly, the results show that as the degree of constriction increases, both CQ and SoE values decrease, indicating breathier and weaker voicing. Similar changes in voicing quality are observed throughout the course of the production of a given segment. Implications of these results for a greater understanding of source-tract interactions and for the phonological notion of sonority are discussed.

The Accentual Phrase in Singapore English.

This paper reports on a speech production experiment that explores whether the accentual phrase (AP) represents an abstract level of prosodic phrasing in Singapore English. Specifically, it tests whether the right edge of the AP is associated with phrase-final lengthening, the degree of which can be distinguished from lengthening associated with the intonational phrase (IP). Target words were produced in matched sentence contexts in 3 phrasal positions: AP-medial (wordfinal), AP-final, and IP-final. As predicted, target words in AP-final position were longer than those in AP-medial position and shorter than those in IP-final position. Analysis of target duration and f0 together shows that AP boundaries are well discriminated from medial positions. Together, these results strongly support an AP level of phrasing for Singapore English and highlight its role in predicting timing variability.