It is generally believed that Turkish stress is always word-final. Closer examination, however, reveals several types of exceptions to this pattern involving both roots and affixes. This paper proposes a unified analysis of regular and irregular stress in Turkish that crucially depends on our definition of the Phonological Word. In addition, we discuss stress in constituents beyond the word, and provide evidence for the Clitic Group as well as the Phonological Phrase. Finally, we also briefly discuss vowel harmony and a set of syllabification phenomena, and show how the latter, in particular, provide independent support for the proposal we advance here.
We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second languge (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux, Kakehi, Hirose, Pallier, & Mehler's (1999) results that suggested that listeners perceive epenthetic vowels within consonantal sequences that violate the phonotactics of their L1. Korean employs at least two kinds of phonotactic restrictions: (i) syllable structure restrictions that prohibit the occurence of certain consonants in coda position STRUCTURE (e.g., *[c.], *[g.]), while allowing others (e.g., [k.], [l.]), and (ii) consonantal contact restrictions that ban the co-occurrence of certain heterosyllabic consonants (e.g., *[k.m]; *[l.n]) due to various phonological processes that repair such sequences on the surface (i.e., /k.m/ --> [n.m]; /ll.n/ --> [l.l]). The results suggest that Korean syllable structure restrictions, rather than consonantal contact restrictions, result in the perception of epenthetic vowels. Furthermore, the frequency of co-occurrence fails to explain the epenthesis effects in the percept of consonant clusters employed in the present study. We address questions regarding the interaction between speech perception and phonology and test the validity of Steriade's (2001 a,b) Perceptual-Mapping (P-Map) hypothesis for the Korean sonorant assimilation processes. Our results indicate that Steriade's hypothesis makes incorrect predictions about Korean phonology and that speech perception is not isomorphic to speech production.
Native language prosodic structure is known to modulate the processing of non-native suprasegmental information. It has been shown that native speakers of French, a language without lexical stress, have difficulties storing non-native stress contrasts. We investigated whether the ability to store lexical tone (as in Mandarin Chinese) also depends on the first language (L1) prosodic structure and, if so, how. We tested participants from a stress language (German), a language without word stress (French), a language with restricted lexical tonal contrasts (Japanese), and Mandarin Chinese controls. Furthermore, German has a rich intonational structure, while French and Japanese dispose of fewer utterance-level pitch contrasts. The participants learnt associations between disyllabic non-words (4 tonal contrasts) and objects and indicated whether picture-word pairs matched with what they had learnt (complete match, segmental or tonal mismatch conditions). In the tonal mismatch condition, the Mandarin Chinese controls had the highest sensitivity, followed by the German participants. The French and Japanese participants showed no sensitivity towards these tonal contrasts. Utterance-level prosody is hence better able to predict success in second language (L2) tone learning than word prosody.
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