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The current study examined whether or not lexical access is influenced by detailed phonological features during the silent reading of Chinese sentences. We used two types of two-character target words (Mandarin sandhi-tone and base-tone). The first characters of the words in the sandhi-tone condition had a tonal alternation, but no tonal alternation was involved in the base-tone condition. Recordings of eye movements revealed that native Mandarin Chinese readers viewed the base-tone target words more briefly than the sandhi-tone target words when they were infrequent. Such articulation-specific effects on visual word processing, however, diminished for frequent words. We suggest that a conflict in tonal representation at a character/morpheme level and at a word level induces prolongation in fixation duration on infrequent sandhi-tone words, and conclude that these tonal effects appear to reflect articulation simulation of words during the silent reading of Chinese sentences.

This review is based on the roundtable conference promoted by professors Carmen Matzenauer, Luciani Tenani and Christina Abreu Gomes and coordinated by professor Jose Magalhaes, aiming to discuss various perspectives in the field of phonology, in honor of the outstanding linguist Leda Bisol. A lecture given by Carmen Matzenauer on Generative Phonology and its main assumptions (e.g. levels of representation, rules and features) initiates the roundtable conference, in which she presents language acquisition data and discusses some ramifications of Generative Phonology, specifically Nonlinear Phonology. Furthermore, Luciani Tenani presents interesting examples concerning vocalic sandhi in Brazilian Portuguese based on assumptions derived from Prosodic Phonology located in the domains of Generative Phonology. Eventually, Christina Abreu Gomes discusses Exemplar-based models applied to phonological theory, referencing the continuity between lexicon and grammar proposed by these models as well as presenting effects of type and token frequencies in the use of language.

Despite various work which aimed to identify the phonetic and structural underpinning of tone sandhi directionality, the underlying mechanism that governs tone sandhi remains unknown. We note that the two widely discussed properties of tone sandhi, their phonetic grounds and directionality, correspond to two types of cognitive biases widely investigated in segmental phonology, namely substantive bias and structural bias respectively. This study examines structural simplicity and phonetic naturalness of tone sandhi patterns across seventeen Chinese varieties. Based on a structure-based analysis, we show that tone sandhi patterns are overwhelmingly uni-directional (i.e. structurally simple) either throughout a sandhi system or within each grammatical category. Crucially, uni-directionality is largely right-dominant, which could be attributed to its phonetic grounding. We argue that structural simplicity grounded on phonetic substance better captures tone sandhi asymmetries and such phonetically-grounded structural simplicity bias is reflected in the asymmetries of Chinese tone sandhi directionality.

Strict criteria on phonological categoryhood coupled with strict privativity of representation inevitably lead to a conclusion that sonorants must not contain a prime responsible for voicing. Assuming that this prime is also not supplied to sonorants in the course of phonological derivation, this class of segments, contrary to observed patterns, should be inactive with respect to voicing phenomena. Presonorant sandhi voicing in Cracow-Poznan Polish is used to show how such apparent patterns can be dealt with without compromising the above theoretical assumptions. This however has consequences which bear on almost every aspect of laryngeal phonology. Some of them include: arbitrariness of the relation between phonology and phonetics, emergent nature of laryngeal categories, minimization of the role of phonological computation, re-evaluation of typical analytical criteria for deciding on phonological representation of laryngeal distinctions, which are used in phonological practice, as well as a possibility ...

Consonant cluster simplification in Tundra Nenets coexists with other consonantal alternations, such as fricative strengthening, lenition of stops, and a variety of NC-effects, which all apply within the same phrasal domain. These processes interact with each other, suggesting an opaque ordering within the same post-lexical domain and thus presenting a challenge not only for inherently parallel theories like classical Optimality Theory, but also for the cyclic derivational approaches such as Stratal OT. We analyze all instances of Tundra Nenets cluster simplification as coalescence and show that a variety of apparently opaque alternations accompanying cluster simplification can be seen as transparent on this account. We also argue that strengthening in consonant clusters is caused by an intermediate stage where coda obstruents lose their place and turn into a glottal stop.

This paper intends to investigate Greek influence on the Latin sound change [b] > [β] suggested occasionally in the literature by surveying not only the relevant linguistic data of Latin/Romance and Koine/Modern Greek but also the relevant literature and by involving and analyzing data sets recorded from 18 Roman provinces and the city of Rome in the Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of the Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age (cf. http://lldb.elte.hu/) by a more differentiated phonological approach considering external sandhi rules and in a chronological distribution more detailed than any applied before. In the end, the influence of Greek has been evidenced at least for some areas and especially for the early period (1 st –3 rd century AD), which is more important in this respect than the late period (4 th –6 th century AD), since then the merger can also be explained by developments in Latin itself beside a supposed external influence.

Phonological descriptions often make reference to prosodic boundaries without exploring the origins of those boundaries. In the Onset Prominence representational framework, prosodic boundaries fall out from the same mechanisms that govern word-internal phonology. These mechanisms are parametric. Opposing settings for these parameters in Polish and English allow for a unified analysis of apparently diverse phonological phenomena including cluster phonotactics, the behavior of post-vocalic consonants, the realization of word-initial vowels, and the application or non-application of external sandhi.

This chapter reviews the significant development of research on the second language acquisition of the sound system of standard Chinese. While major findings from studies on both segmental (vowels and consonants) and supra-segmental features of L2 Chinese phonology are outlined, particular attention is paid to the acquisition of Chinese lexical tones. This review begins with a summary of how non-native tonal errors have historically been viewed and how these views have changed over time. Several aspects of the second language Chinese tone studies are reviewed and discussed, such as the acquisition order of tones, the third tone and its sandhi rules, tone perception and production, positional effects in second language tone grammar and the acquisition of Chinese intonation, etc., followed by a discussion regarding research approaches of empirical studies of the second language perception and production of Chinese tones. The chapter ends with pedagogical implications and points out future directions of research on second language Chinese sounds.

Phonological theories differ as to whether phonological knowledge is abstract (e.g., phonemic), concrete (e.g., exemplar-based), or some combination of the two. The abstractness/concreteness of phonological knowledge was examined by analyzing the process of /r/-sandhi in two corpora of spoken English. Two predictions of exemplar-based theories were examined: the extent to which a word manifests a particular sound pattern like /r/-deletion should be influenced by (1) its lexical frequency and (2) its distribution in the language with respect to the sound pattern’s conditioning environment. Lexical frequency was found to influence /r/-sandhi in a corpus of rhotic American English but not in a corpus of predominantly non-rhotic British English. No effect of a word’s long-term distribution was found in either corpus. These results support theories proposing that phonological knowledge is both word-specific and abstract and indicate that speakers do not store all phonetic detail that is in principle available to them. The factors that may favor the use of word-specific versus abstract representations are discussed.

This paper documents present-day Japanese loanwords from Korean and contributes to the debate on input structure in loanword phonology. It argues that loanword patterns may be shaped by loanword-specific grammars. Present-day Korean-to-Japanese phrase adaptation of obstruents provides evidence for the existence of a loanword-specific grammar. In adaptations of Korean names and other phrases, an allophonic alternation in Korean, namely the intersonorant voicing of lenis stops, appears at the word boundary. Comparisons with other word sandhi phenomena reveal that voicing of a lenis in this position is not due to faithful rendition of Korean phonetic inputs but rather to a special rule of Japanese loanword phonology. The point is stressed by another analogous fact that the Korean coda behaves differently from codas of western languages in loanword adaptations, also requiring grammatical explanation for Korean word adaptation.

Connected speech processes have played a major role in shaping theories about phonological organization, and how phonology interacts with other components of the grammar (Selkirk, 1974; Kiparsky, 1982; Kaisse, 1985; Nespor and Vogel, 1986, among others). External sandhi is subject to locality conditions, and it is more variable compared to processes applying word-internally. We suggest that an important part of understanding these two properties of external sandhi is the locality of speech production planning. Presenting evidence from French liaison, we argue that the effect of lexical frequency on variability can be understood as a consequence of the narrow window of phonological encoding during speech production planning. This proposal complements both abstract, symbolic and gestural overlap-based accounts of phonological alternations. By connecting the study of phonological alternations with the study of factors influencing speech production planning, we can derive novel predictions about patterns of variability in external sandhi, and better understand the data that drive the development of phonological theories.

The non–Pama-Nyugan, Tangkic languages were spoken until recently in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. The most extensively documented are Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta. Their phonology is notable for its opaque, word-final deletion rules and extensive word-internal sandhi processes. The morphology contains complex relationships between sets of forms and sets of functions, due in part to major historical refunctionalizations, which have converted case markers into markers of tense and complementization and verbal suffixes into case markers. Syntactic constituency is often marked by inflectional concord, resulting frequently in affix stacking. Yukulta in particular possesses a rich set of inflection-marking possibilities for core arguments, including detransitivized configurations and an inverse system. These relate in interesting ways historically to argument marking in Lardil and Kayardild. Subordinate clauses are marked for tense across most constituents other than the subject, and such tense marking is also found in main clauses in Lardil and Kayardild, which have lost the agreement and tense-marking second-position clitic of Yukulta. Under specific conditions of co-reference between matrix and subordinate arguments, and under certain discourse conditions, clauses may be marked, on all or almost all words, by complementization markers, in addition to inflection for case and tense.

Graphemic alternations such as -replacement (e.g. ) are obligatory in inflectional processes, but they do not occur in compounding (cf. ). In derivational processes, the obligatoriness varies depending on the suffix (cf. ). This variation in graphemic alternations is used to determine the juncture strength of derivational products. On the basis of the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (CoCA), 46 suffixes are investigated. The resulting scale is found to correlate closely with the type parsing ratio from Hay and Baayen (in Yearbook of Morphology 2001, pp. 203–235, 2002), a purely morphological measure. As the graphemic alternations investigated are not mirrored in phonology, the results are taken to be an argument for a partly autonomous writing system that can in turn be used to argue for or against morphological structure, quite like phonological sandhi or liaison phenomena.

This paper examines a case of Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi, where not being a free-standing form changes the sandhi pattern. It argues that phonological evaluation takes the type of boundaries into account, i.e. a syntactic boundary will map onto prosody only when it is a boundary of a free-standing form. This paper also shows that Mandarin Tone 3 sandhi, which was believed to be a cyclic application, can instead be derived with an output-output constraint.

This study examined the neural substrates underlying the implementation of phonological rule in lexical tone by the Tone 3 sandhi phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese. Tone 3 sandhi is traditionally described as the substitution of Tone 3 with Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (33 →23) during speech production. Tone 3 sandhi enables the examination of tone processing in the phonological level with the least involvement of segments. Using the fMRI technique, we measured brain activations corresponding to the monosyllable and disyllable sequences of the four Chinese lexical tones, while manipulating the requirement on overt oral response. The application of Tone 3 sandhi to disyllable sequence of Tone 3 was confirmed by our behavioral results. Larger brain responses to overtly produced disyllable Tone 3 (33 > 11, 22, and 44) were found in right posterior IFG by both whole-brain and ROI analyses. We suggest that the right IFG was responsible for the processing of Tone 3 sandhi. Intense temporo-frontal interaction is needed in speech production for self-monitoring. The involvement of the right IFG in tone production might result from its interaction with the right auditory cortex, which is known to specialize in pitch. Future studies using tools with better temporal resolutions are needed to illuminate the dynamic interaction between the right inferior frontal regions and the left-lateralized language network in tone languages.

The phonetics and phonology of consonant– f0 interaction in Shanghai Chinese were examined to further refine our understanding of consonant– f0 interaction in general. Bi-syllabic nouns, which form tone sandhi domains, were elicited within template sentences. These nouns vary in (1) lexical tone of the sandhi domain-initial syllable; (2) laryngeal contrast in the stop onset of the second syllable; and (3) discourse context (i.e., with focus vs. without focus). Results suggest that the interaction of stop onset and f0 in the sandhi domain non-initial syllables in Shanghai Chinese cannot be just attributed to the phonetic implementation of the phonological feature contrast in the language (as suggested by the tone–consonant co-occurrence pattern in tone sandhi domain-initial position), nor can it be due to purely automatic results of consonant production. Rather, the observed f0 perturbation pattern suggests the interaction of both effects. Speakers do voluntarily control their articulatory settings, at least to some extent, so as to enhance the stop contrast. Such voluntary control of articulation is dependent on both tonal and discourse context. Furthermore, complex laryngeal settings, which may not condition categorical co-occurrence patterns between tone and consonant, can nevertheless determine in part patterns of consonant– f0 interaction in the language. Our results also have implications for consonant feature specifications and their phonetic implication in general.

Recent studies on productivity have shown that native speakers’ phonological knowledge not only includes statistical patterns in the lexicon, but also patterns that cannot be gleaned from the lexicon. This is demonstrated in speakers’ analytical bias towards abstract phonological representations ( Davidson, 2005 ), single-feature dependency ( Moreton, 2008 ), perceptually motivated phonological scales ( Zuraw, 2007 ), as well as their difficulties with exceptionless opaque patterns in wug tests ( Zhang and Lai, 2008 ). Based on the results of a wug-test, we show in this paper that the opaque tone sandhi pattern in Taiwanese reduplication is a case in which the speakers’ knowledge is a combination of more than, less than, and exactly what their lexicon informs them of: the phonetic effects of the sandhis are overlearned, the opaque tone sandhis are underlearned, and the lexical statistics are properly learned. We further argue that a substantively biased Maximum Entropy grammar that encodes learning biases against lexical listing and phonetically unmotivated patterns can model the simultaneous underlearning, overlearning, and proper learning of the lexical patterns by Taiwanese speakers.

Chinese tone has played an important role in the development of phonological theory from distinctive features and autosegmental phonology to Optimality Theory and its various adaptations. This article reviews some past and current issues in the analysis of Chinese tone and points out how the development of theoretical phonology has shaped the highs and lows of this research enterprise. To fruitfully proceed into the future, I plead to phonologists working in this area to cultivate a new respect for empirical data based on well-designed phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. This is necessitated by the observations that speakers’ knowledge of tone and tone sandhi may not be identical to their patterns in the lexicon, and impressionistic transcriptions, no matter how careful, can be inaccurate. Moreover, patterns of tone in Chinese are rich in variation, gradience, and exceptions due to dialectal contact and the influence from the dominant Standard Chinese, and existing research has shown that the productivity of Chinese tone sandhi patterns is influenced by both categorical factors such as phonological opacity and gradient factors such as the phonetic nature and the frequency of usage of the sandhi. An empirical basis built around these issues will allow the study of Chinese tone to make continued contributions to the development of phonological theory and our understanding of speakers’ phonological knowledge.

Ma problématique centrale porte sur le rapport de la variation à l’acquisition/apprentissage phonologique. L’ensemble de mes travaux évalue les effets du rapport lexique-phonologie pour deux types de publics (FLE et FLM), deux types d’âge et deux types de corpus (écologique et expérimental). La variation convoque selon moi différentes disciplines car son étude est complexe. C’est pourquoi mon approche est interdisciplinaire, je fais référence fréquemment au cours de mes recherches à la sociolinguistique et la psycholinguistique. Sont présentés ici les différents axes de mes recherches répartis en deux thématiques, la phonétique corrective en FLE et l’acquisition des alternances phonologiques chez l’enfant.

This new addition to the series on the phonology of the world's languages edited by Jacques Durand is the most comprehensive study of the synchronic phonology of Standard Chinese (or Standard Mandarin) since the publication of Cheng's (1973) monograph. Duanmu provides a detailed description of the phonological facts in Standard Chinese (henceforth SC), some of which are new or little studied before, offers new perspectives on old problems and proposes a theoretical analysis of these facts in current frameworks such as feature geometry, metrical phonology and Optimality Theory. The main innovation and, in my opinion, the most significant contribution of this book is the extensive coverage of stress (or metrical structure) and its influence on the order and length of compound words. The role of metrical structure is also extended to the analysis of some long-standing problems of the well-known tone 3 sandhi process. Claiming the existence of stress and its importance to understanding the interaction of phonology and morphosyntax in SC may come as a surprise to some readers since SC is not a stress language and its phonetic stress is notoriously difficult to detect. The proposed metrical analysis, nonetheless, is innovative and convincingly argued, and has clearly established the phonological relevance of metrical structure for SC.

Laboratory phonology tests the predictions of phonological analyses through experimental investigations of phonetic behavior. This paper describes how a laboratory phonologist might investigate three issues in the analysis of the prosody of signed languages : the internal structure,if any,of the signed syllable, the realization of lexical and phrasal prominence, and the marking of edges. The paper proposes to investigate the internal structure of the syllable by adapting a variety of psycholinguistic techniques that have been extensively used to study the phonetic packaging of phonological material in spoken languages. Phonological and phonetic arguments are presented in support of the hypothesis that signed languages will increase movement kinematics to convey phrasal and perhaps lexical prominence, and an experiment is sketched that would test this hypothesis. Finally, the paper suggests that the experimental study of the edges of sign articulations might allow a clearer choice between competing phonetic and phonological accounts of external sandhi in language in general.

In the last few years, the interest of phonologists has largely shifted to the nature of phonological generalisations. In summary, should phonology be based on classical rewrite rules (the so-called derivational approach) or should it, on the other hand, ban rules in favour of constraints (the so-called non- derivational approaches) ? The aim of this paper is to compare and contrast various 'derivational' and 'non-derivational' approaches to a specific problem : r-linking and r-intrusion (more neutrally 'r sandhi') in some varieties of non-rhotic English (particularly, RP, London English and Boston English). After a brief presentation of the phenomena under review, the paper examines three possible analyses of linking and intrusive r : the classical rule-based approach, an approach based on principles and parameters, and one approach formulated in terms of constraints i.e. invoking the Optimality Theory framework. The conclusion drawn is that despite the fact that constraint-based approaches are promising and potentially much more restrictive than rule-based descriptions, they are still tentative in a number of respects. Nevertheless, although much empirical and foundational work still needs to be done, some progress has been achieved in breadth and depth of coverage, justifying the idea that phonology is a cumulative science., résumé : Au cours des dernières années, les recherches en phonologie se sont orientées vers la nature des généralisations phonologiques. Pour résumer, faut-il baser la phonologie sur des règles de réécriture classiques (l'approche dite 'dérivationnelle') ou au contraire faut-il remplacer les règles par des contraintes (l'approche dite 'non- dérivationnelle') ? Le but de cet article est de comparer et d'évaluer diverses descriptions « dérivationnelles » et « non- dérivationnelles » d'un problème spécifique : le r de liaison et le r intrusif (en termes plus neutres le r de sandhi) dans les variétés non-rhotiques de l'anglais de Grande-Bretagne (en particulier la Received Pronunciation, l'anglais de Londres et celui de Boston). Nous examinons en détail trois analyses possibles du r de liaison : une analyse classique en termes de règles, une analyse dans le cadre 'Principes et Paramètres' et une analyse en termes de contraintes dans le cadre de la Théorie de l'Optimalité. La conclusion à laquelle nous aboutissons est qu'en dépit du fait que les modèles s'appuyant sur des contraintes sont plus prometteurs et potentiellement plus restrictifs que les modèles s'appuyant sur des règles (transformationnelles) classiques, ils se heurtent tous à des difficultés face aux phénomènes décrits ici. Néanmoins, même si un important travail empirique et méthodologique attend encore les phono- logues, il semble bien que les analyses gagnent progressivement en profondeur justifiant l'hypothèse que la phonologie est une discipline cumulative., Durand Jacques. Linking r in English : constraints, principles and parameters, or rules ?. In: Histoire Épistémologie Langage, tome 19, fascicule 1, 1997. Construction des théories du son [Première partie] pp. 43-72.

This study proposes a unified account of consonant gemination in external sandhi in Italian, also known as Raddoppiamento phenomena. As opposed to the common interpretation of Raddoppiamento as being driven by well-formedness conditions on Italian rhymes, it argues that gemination in sandhi ought to be analysed as a fortition process driven by positional factors. Not only does this account unify all of the Italian Raddoppiamento phenomena (backwards Raddoppiamento, synchronic and idiosyncratic Raddoppiamento Sintattico) but it provides a picture of the phenomena that is consistent from a theoretical, diachronic, geographic, cross-linguistic and synchronic point of view.

International audience; Liaison is a sandhi phenomenon in French. Over the last four decades, it has given rise to many different models illustrating the whole range of phonological theories. More recently, new studies have documented its acquisition in French-speaking children as well as adult learners of French as a second language. These studies have resulted in the elaboration of two models of the acquisition process: 1/ the constructionist model (Chevrot, Dugua & Fayol, 2009; Nicoladis & Paradis, 2011) developed within the framework of the usage-based theories; 2/ the phonological model (Wauquier, 2009) which represents the framework of nonlinear phonology. Our aim is to re-examine the usage-based model in the light of the criticisms and suggestions made by Wauquier (2009). We shall first present the two models and then examine the issues under discussion. After that, we shall present longitudinal data testing a prediction made by the phonological model with regard to the generalization process in L1 and L2 acquisition. To conclude, we shall identify the points that remain to be clarified for each of the models and the directions which future research should take.

San Juan Quiahije (SJQ) Chatino is an under-documented indigenous language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, by some 3000 speakers. Like other members of the Eastern Chatino branch, SJQ has a complex tonal system—in particular, four tone levels and 11 lexical tones (14 when considering sandhi contexts). Excellent linguistic investigations of SJQ phonology (Cruz 2004, 2011) and discourse analysis (Cruz & Woodbury 2014, Cruz 2014) exist, but there is virtually no empirical phonetic work. We present exploratory and descriptive investigation of the tones of San Juan Quiahije Chatino. Data from one female native speaker largely align with the tonal description provided in Cruz (2011): our findings confirm the presence of a multitude of tones, and reveal that several lexical tones are merged in isolation. Furthermore, while depressor consonant effects—wherein tonal targets are lower after voiced obstruents than after voiceless obstruents—have traditionally been discussed primarily in the context of African languages (Bradshaw 1999), we discover a consistent lowering of tone by approximately 25 Hz after voiced consonants. The effect is present in both low and high tone contexts and perseverates throughout the vowel.

This paper studies adjective reduplications in Fuzhou within the framework of autosegmental phonology and lexical phonology. I first examine the morphological process of reduplication, focusing on the definition of base as the target of reduplication. I argue that the bimorphemic base for reduplication is defined in two ways: either morphologically, where the entire compound reduplicates as a whole, or prosodically, where reduplication applies under positive prosodic circumscription accessing either or both edges of the bimorphemic base. I then investigate the phonological changes subsequent and unique to reduplication. I propose that a binary iambic foot is constructed at the right edge in each reduplication output where the penult syllable dominated by the weak node undergoes regular sandhi. The antepenult and preantepenult, if any, are unfooted and will have their tones delined and later get a default low tone. I also show that the fixed melodic material in one of the reduplication patterns is the result of a default vowel realization. Finally, I discuss the extension of the metrical treatment to the non-reduplication data as provided in Chan (1985).