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Abstract: Here we investigate the historical origins and acoustic correlates of a hypothesized tonal development in subdialects of the Nahuatl spoken in the Balsas River valley of central Guerrero state in Mexico. We hypothesize that some subdialects have developed high tone on a syllable preceding a syllable with a breathy-voiced coda [ɦ] (< *h). In subdialects retaining [ɦ], coda [ɦ] was found to slightly lower F0 on the tautosyllabic vowel, creating a high–low F0 contour beginning on the preceding syllable. We propose that tone was developed as a reanalysis of the F0 contour as a phonological tonal specification. Through this tonal development, hybrid stress and tone systems have arisen, as the historical penultimate stress accent described for Nahuatl generally has been retained in the tonal dialects. Though such systems are typologically rare, a comparison of the development of other such hybrid systems indicates that they follow a similar historical path. That is, a stress language develops tone through the reinterpretation of a coarticulatory F0 effect as a tonal specification. We suggest that hybrid stress and tone systems may be unstable: Our results indicate that the historical stress accent may be transitioning to tone in subdialects with innovated tone. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Maa, a Nilo-Saharan language, exhibits a cross-height vowel harmony system known as ‘tongue root harmony’. The high and mid vowels participate in this system, but the low vowel does not. The Maa harmony system is briefly described, followed by an investigation into the phonetic properties of the vowels. Five Maa speakers were recorded producing 100 example words three times each. The [+ATR] vowels were found to have consistently lower first formant values and relatively less energy in the higher frequency regions than their [-ATR] counterparts. An investigation of the differences between the auditorily quite similar [-ATR] high and [+ATR] mid vowels revealed durational differences for the back vowels and much inter-speaker variation for the front vowels. Electroglottographic data obtained from one speaker indicated a slightly less constricted glottis for [+ATR] than [-ATR] vowels. This phonation difference is not readily detectable auditorily in the current data, but has been reported previously for Maa. The results contribute to typological knowledge about the phonetics of tongue root vowel contrasts, as very little data is currently available for Nilo-Saharan languages. A possible origin of stronger voice quality distinctions common to other tongue root harmony languages is offered from the theory of Auditory Enhancement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Previous research has demonstrated that English /r/ is perceptually more dissimilar from Japanese /r/ than English /l/ is for native Japanese (NJ) speakers. It has been proposed by the Speech Learning Model that the more distant an L2 sound (phonetic segment) is from the closest L1 speech sound, the more learnable the L2 sound will be (in: W. Strange (Ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-language Research, York Press, Timonium, MD, 1995, p. 233). This hypothesis was evaluated in this study by investigating whether NJ speakers will have more success acquiring English /r/ than /l/. A longitudinal study examined the perception (Experiment 1) and production (Experiment 2) of English /l/, /r/, and/w/ by NJ adults and children who were living in the US at the time of testing. The results suggested that there was greater improvement for English /r/ than English /l/ among the NJ children. The NJ children''s discrimination of /l/-/r/ and /r/-/w/ was significantly better at the second testing (T2) than 1 year earlier (T1). The NJ children also showed greater improvement from T1 to T2 in producing /r/ than /l/. The results are taken as support for a hypothesis of the Speech Learning Model (in: W. Strange (Ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-language Research, York Press, Timonium, MD, 1995, p. 233) that degree of perceived phonetic dissimilarity influences L2 learners’ success in acquiring L2 phonetic segments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]