The phonetic gesture of stop consonant aspiration, which is predictable in a Germanic language such as English, has been described traditionally as ranging from a ‘puff of air’ upon release of closure (Heffner 1950) to the segmental occurrence of a following voiceless glottal approximant /h/ (Trager & Smith 1951). Within the generative phonology paradigm, however, aspiration has been construed as a featural property rather than as an independent segment of its own, often casually identified simply as [+aspiration], or, following Chomsky & Halle (1968), as a positive specification resulting from ‘heightened subglottal pressure’. We take this kind of view here as well, employing a notation with superscript h ([Ch]) to indicate representations in which aspiration is encoded as an integral feature of the segment with which it is associated, while we explore the phonological realisation of aspiration in Germanic as the reflex manifestation of a spread or open glottis, an idea first advanced in the seminal work of Kim (1970), and since developed in Anderson & Ewen's treatment of ‘|O| languages’ (1987: 195–199)

Recent work in acoustic phonetics purports to show that neutralization of the voiced/voiceless contrast in final position in German is only apparent, because it is incomplete. Thus, a recent study shows that native speakers of German do regularly devoice word-final obstruents, but they also produce slightly longer vowels before the morphophonemically voiced obstruents (e.g. Rad ‘wheel’) than before the voiceless ones (e.g. Rat ‘advice’). However, our work replicating these studies indicates that the previously observed differences actually resulted from hypercorrect spelling pronunciation, and that in more natural linguistic contexts the neutralization is indeed complete.

MilwaukeeThis paper is intended as a contribution to an evergrowing body of literature on the role played by principles and parameters of Universal Grammar in second-language acquisition theory.A recent paper by Broselow and Finer (1991) proposes that markedness as defined in terms of the multivalued Minimal Sonority Distance (MSD) parameter is definitive in their subjects' knowledge of certain consonant clusters in syllable onsets. This parameter provides for the characterization of the various types of consonant clusters allowed in the onsets of syllables in different languages. The object of Broselow and Finer's study was to determine whether L2 learners find clusters which are relatively more marked according to the MSD parameter to be more difficult to learn than cluster types which are relatively less marked.The present paper, however, argues that it is typological markedness (Hawkins, 1987) rather than sonority distance per se which better explains L2 learners' knowledge of English clusters in syllable onsets. In line with Clements' (1990) comprehensive investigation of sonority relations within the syllable, this paper argues that markedness alone suffices to account for the observed interlanguage patterns. Using Clements' principles, which themselves actually follow from the overall theory of markedness, the interlanguage obstruent results reported by Broselow and Finer fall out automatically.

The purpose of this study was to conduct an acoustic examination of the obstruent stops produced by Korean–English bilingual children in connection with the question of whether bilinguals establish distinct categories of speech sounds across languages. Stop productions were obtained from ninety children in two age ranges, five and ten years: thirty Korean–English bilinguals, thirty monolingual Koreans and thirty monolingual English speakers. Voice-Onset-Time (VOT) lag at word-initial stop and fundamental frequency (f0) in the following vowel (hereafter vowel-onset f0) were measured. The bilingual children showed different patterns of VOT in comparison to both English and Korean monolinguals, with longer VOT in their production of Korean stop consonants and shorter VOT for English. Moreover, the ten-year-old bilinguals distinguished all stop categories using both VOT and vowel-onset f0,whereas the five-year-olds tended to make stop distinctions based on VOT but not vowel-onset f0. The results of this study suggest that bilingual children at around five years of age do not yet have fully separate stop systems, and that the systems continue to evolve during the developmental period.

The research we report here is intended to build an understanding of several well-known yet poorly comprehended problems relating to phonemic contrasts in the learning of L2 pronunciation. The competing influences of similarity and difference between native and target language sound systems, in particular, are central to this understanding, which we believe show that L2 phonology is a highly abstract enterprise parallel to the phonologies of primary languages, rather than -as has been assumed -a mere imitation of the target language's pronunciations. We identify three interesting learning situations which involve the target language's having different phonemic contrasts from the native language. In the first situation, the native language has neither of two sounds which contrast in the target language; in the second situation, the native language includes just one of two sounds which contrast in the target language. And in the third situation, the na…ive language has both of the sounds in question but shows no contrast between them, i.e., a phoneme of the native language has two (or more) allophones that categorize as separate phonemes in the target language.

No abstract

This paper builds on growing evidence that aspirated or fortis obstruents in languages like English and German are laryngeally marked, but that phonetic voicing in the (unmarked) unaspirated or lenis series is contextually determined. Employing the laryngeal feature set proposed by Halle & Stevens (1971), as incorporated into the ' dimensional theory ' of laryngeal representation (Avery & Idsardi 2001, forthcoming), we develop an explicit account of this phonetic enhancement of phonological contrasts, which is widely known as ' passive voicing '. We find that both passive voicing and inherent aspiration have been phonetic and phonological characteristics of the Germanic languages since the break-up of Indo-European, with laryngeally unmarked stops repeatedly enhanced by the gesture of [spread glottis]. A key implication of this view is that Verner's Law was not an innovation specifically of early Germanic, but rather is an automatic (ultimately phonologised) reflex of passive voicing, itself a ' persistent change' rising out of the enduring ' base of articulation ' that came to characterise Germanic.

Abstract.A number of modifications affect the sound structure of foreign words as they are bor-rowed into Korean. We consider specifically the adaptation of word-final stops, liquids, and voiceless as well as voiced coronal sibilants. The particular manifestation of these is shown to corre-late with the place they hold in the syllable structure of the recipient language rather than, as might seem to be the case, with either contrastive categories of the source language or allophonic qualities of the recipient. This discussion thus contributes to the continuing debate over the awareness that listeners may have of phonetic properties that are contrastive in the source language but redundant in the recipient (and hence presumably below the threshold of categorical perception), as well as vice versa, and it offers a unified view of the factors which appear to be at play in the phonological pro-cessing of both native words and loanwords. At base is a simple yet comprehensive principle of phonological perception: Phonetic representations are interpreted according to the salient perceptual categories of the listener's native language.