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The Baren vowel in German is known to be subject to extensive variation, including, for some speakers, a merger with the Beeren vowel. This article investigates the behaviour of the Baren and Beeren vowels in Standard German in Switzerland and Austria. We observe an ongoing merger in Swiss Standard German but an ongoing reversal of such a merger in Austrian Standard German. Independent evidence shows that both varieties (Swiss and Austrian German) accommodate toward the prestige variety in northern Germany. This presents a kind of paradox: why should merger and reversal occur side by side? We attribute these opposite tendencies of merger and reversal to perceptual salience. In the prestige variety, much variation between these two vowels occurs, so Swiss and Austrian speakers are exposed to variable input for both vowels. This paper argues that the vowel that is different from the own variety is perceptually most salient and therefore accommodated to. As for the Swiss speakers, the merger of the Baren and the Beeren vowel is unexpected, therefore salient, hence accommodated to. As for the Austrian speakers, the distinction between the Baren and the Beeren vowel is unexpected, therefore salient, and accommodated to. This leads to the observed, opposite, patterns of change

Believed dialect influences speech perception by linguistically naïve speakers. How much accent-induced bias affects perception of linguistically trained speakers is still unclear. This study experimentally investigates the influence of believed dialect on plosive perception by subjects who were phonetically and phonologically trained. Identical syllables were presented twice to each subject. In one session, the subjects were informed that the variety was a Mandarin dialect which has voiceless unaspirated and aspirated voiceless stops; and in the other session that it was a Wu dialect, which has voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and breathy stops. More breathy stops were reported if Wu was the believed dialect. Plosive phonation in Wu is related to lexical tone, and we show that lexical tone causes another bias to plosive perception. This suggests that linguistically trained transcribers are susceptible to higher order linguistic knowledge and it demonstrates the difficulty of avoiding biased perception when the coder forms a belief about the variety that he/she transcribes. We also advocate speech perception models which include a component that accounts for the role ofexpectedsounds.

Hong Kong English is to a certain extent a standardized English variety spoken in a bilingual (English-Cantonese) context. In this article we compare this (native) variety with English as a foreign language spoken by other Cantonese speakers, viz. learners of English in Guangzhou (mainland China). We examine whether the notion of standardization is relevant for intonation in this case and thus whether Hong Kong English is different from Cantonese English in a wider perspective, or whether it is justified to treat Hong Kong English and Cantonese English as the same variety (as far as intonation is concerned). We present a comparison between intonational contours of different sentence types in the two varieties, and show that they are very similar. This shows that, in this respect, a learned foreign-language variety can resemble a native variety to a great extent.

The low-mid unrounded front vowel /ɛː/ in German (as in Bären) has been subject to change since Old High German. It slowly merged with the high-mid unrounded front vowel /eː/, but a reversal seems to have emerged recently. This paper investigates both historical and current change of the Bären vowel. Historical change is investigated through literature-based research; current change is examined through corpus-based research. This paper takes the approach of studying both grammatical context and frequency of use. The two major insights of this study are (i) that the BÄREN vowel has been subject to change for a long time and is still variable, and (ii) that frequency effects interact with grammar in an unexpected way. This interaction shows us how to proceed with hybrid grammar-lexicon modelling and I advocate a combined model of Optimality Theory and Exemplar Theory to account for this type of grammar-frequency interactions.

Recent research has shown that speech perception can easily be influenced by the overall accent of the speaker. This paper investigates whether such accentinduced bias also occurs in speech transcription by professional and linguistically trained coders and to what extent such a bias may affect linguistic analyses. We compare the transcriptions of the Bären vowel in Standard German with the acoustic values of these vowels, as well as sociolinguistic analyses based on both of these. The results of the two analyses turn out to be considerably different. Further examination shows that the coders only partly relied on the acoustic values. The residual does not consist of random errors, but correlate with the degree of accentedness of the speakers. We conclude that this accent-induced coder bias led the coders to transcribe the codings according to their expectations about the pronunciation in the local dialect – expectations that were quite different from the acoustic reality.

Relatively little research has addressed the role of LI in the perception of English speech contrasts by Chinese learners of English as L3. The present study investigates the role of LI in the perception of the English alveolar-velar nasal coda contrast (/n/ vs. /η/) after the vowels /i Λ ae/ by bilingual Changsha Chinese speakers, whose LI is Changsha Chinese and L2 is Standard Mandarin. Changsha Chinese only permits an alveolar nasal coda /n/, while Standard Mandarin permits both final /n/ and /η/. We examined whether or not monolingual Standard Mandarin speakers and bilingual Changsha Chinese speakers perceived the English nasal coda contrast equally well. To investigate this, 15 bilingual Changsha Chinese speakers were tested, as well as 15 monolingual Standard Mandarin speakers as a control group. The Standard Mandarin speakers outperformed the bilingual Changsha Chinese speakers, suggesting that the L1 of the Changsha speakers interfered with their perception of the English nasal coda contrast. Besides, it was revealed that the preceding vowel affected the discrimination of the English nasal coda contrast, and that the perception of target nasal codas (/n/ or /η/) was influenced by specific vowels.

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the application of modern methodology to the study of geographic language variation. One instance of this, applied to the Dutch language area, is the topic of dialectometry. It seems fair to say that the measurements in most dialectometrical projects are fairly superficial from a grammatical point of view. In this article, we propose a view of dialect distance which is radically different both in its methodology and in its goals. We present a view in which the distances between grammars are computed rather than the differences between words or constructions, which we view as products of the grammars. In particular, we consider the phenomenon of umlaut in diminutive forms. Umlaut, a phenomenon in which back vowels become front in certain morphological contexts, is virtually absent in the western parts of the Dutch speaking area, but fully productive in many parts of the east. We show how this east-west transition can be elegantly described as a gradual change in grammars

In this paper we discuss the four tones of Standard (Beijing) Mandarin Chinese. First, we will suggest a proposal for their phonological representation. Then, we discuss the order in which they are acquired in first language acquisition, relating this both to the representations we propose and to the relative frequency with which these tones appear in the most frequently used Chinese words. It turns out that the former predicts the order of acquisition more closely than the latter: We provide an explanation for this based on the early stage at which the tones are acquired.