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Second language acquisition often involves the acquisition of stable patterns in a target language. Here we investigate how the acquisition of a variable pronunciation pattern, viz. the pronunciation of the semisuffix -man in professional names in English (e.g. policeman, businessman) is related to the lexical frequency of the words concerned. The pronunciation of this suffix varies between a full vowel and a reduced one in a lexically unpredictable manner (i.e. some words with -man tend to have schwa, others a full vowel, and still others vary between the two). To test how the pronunciation of such words is acquired in a second language, we carried out a picture naming experiment in which Chinese subjects were asked to pronounce them. The results show that the pronunciation of this semisuffix is especially related to the educational status of subjects (major vs. non-major).

Huangyan dialect (, local name: [wɔ̤ɲjɛ˜̤wa̤]) is a variety of Taizhou dialect () as spoken in Zhejiang Province in China1 (see Figure 1).2 Huangyan District had a population of 616,000 people in 2019.3 The Zhejiang Taizhou dialect belongs to the Wu dialect group, which forms the second largest dialect group in China (after Mandarin). The language genealogy of Huangyan is presented in Figure 2. Wu dialects are spoken in the city of Shanghai, Zhejiang Province, southern Jiangsu Province and bordering areas (see Figure 3), an area with an estimated population of 80 million people in 2013 (Lewis 2009). The Wu dialects are not mutually intelligible with (Standard) Mandarin and often not even with each other (Norman 2003, Wang 2014).

An important part of second language acquisition of sound systems involves the distinction between phoneme contrasts that exist in L2 but not in L1. However, L1 and L2 listeners do not always use the same acoustic cues to perceptually distinguish the contrasts. Most studies concentrate on vowel perception, but perceptual cue weighting in consonants is somewhat under-investigated, although equally relevant. This article investigates the cue-weighting of Chinese /t th ts tsh/ by L1 and Danish L2 listeners. The four phonemes are contrastive, and distinguished in aspiration, frication or both. Moreover, Chinese /th ts tsh/ acoustically all overlap with a single phoneme in Danish /ts/, variably realized as [ts] ~ [th], which make it notoriously difficult to acquire the contrasts. We conducted a cue-weighting experiment to investigate how Danish and Chinese listeners use aspiration and frication to perceptually categorize these Chinese sounds. Our results show that Danish learners are not as sensitive as native Chinese to the deciding cues to distinguish the Chinese phoneme contrasts. This study sheds light on L2 sound acquisition in which different phonemes in the target L2 language correspond to a single but variable phoneme in the native language.

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

We investigate the pronunciation of English compounds ending in -man (e.g. policeman, clergyman, mailman), some of which are usually pronounced with a full vowel in -man (mailman), some usually with a reduced vowel (policeman), while other words vary between the two (businessman, gunman). Is it possible to predict when the vowel is reduced or not? We investigate a number of factors that could play a role in this issue: (i) the age of introduction of the word into the English language, (ii) the frequency of the word in the synchronic language, (iii) the meaning of -man in the specific compound, (iv) number of syllables, (v) stress pattern and (vi) spelling variation. Although some of these points have been discussed in the literature before, we present the first large full-scale quantitative investigation of the question whether any of these factors are reliable predictors of the pronunciation (and if so, which one predicts the pronunciation best), as well as the interaction between these factors.

Word frequency plays a role in reduction processes: high-frequency words undergo more reduction than low-frequency words. Pretonic schwa reduction in Dutch is susceptible to frequency effects in this way, but the well-formedness of the cluster that remains after schwa deletion also plays a role. An experiment shows that cluster well-formedness and frequency effects in fact interact with each other. This suggests that phonological models should incorporate both lexical as well a grammatical information. Key words: Frequency effects, phonotactics, pretonic schwa, reduction. Introduction It has been observed for Dutch, that schwa deletion is more likely to be applied, when the resulting consonant cluster consists of an obstruent and subsequent liquid (Booij 1995). Thus all other things being equal, gelijk > $ % –O - $ % –QL S@ µPHDQ¶, because in Dutch $O is a well-formed cluster but $n is not. However, pretonic vowels in Dutch are also known to be more reduced in high-frequency (HF) words than in low-frequency (LF) words (van Oostendorp 1999). This raises the question of whether frequency effects interact with the well-formedness of the cluster that remains after deletion. Is it the case that frequency effects are only found in potential well-formed onset clusters? Or is it rather the case that schwa reduction in consonant-liquid clusters is dependent on word frequency? How does frequency interact with phonotactics exactly? To investigate the effect of cluster well-formedness (CWF) and frequency, a word reading task was carried out. HF and LF words were extracted from Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (Spoken Dutch Corpus) available on www.tst.inl.nl and from the CELEX database on www.celex.mpi. Each HF word with WKH FRQWH[W & %&- was matched with an LF word following a number of criteria: the consonants preceding the schwa and following the schwa were identical, the number of syllables was identical, the number of phonemes was matched as much as possible and stress placement was identical. The corpus frequency counts may deviate from the frequency of the individual lexicon of the subjects. It is well-known in psycholinguistics that word frequency is related to naming latency, in the sense that HF words have shorter latencies than LF words (Oldfield & Wingfield 1965, Jescheniak &

Many linguistic analyses rely on phonetic transcriptions. Two factors that might affect the accuracy of transcriptions are perceived accent and the listener's linguistic knowledge about that accent. This article focuses on the susceptibility of transcribers to such accent-induced bias, based on speaker's accent, transcriber's variety, and the transcriber's knowledge about the language variety they are transcribing. We offer a method to statistically detect accent-induced biases in linguistic transcriptions. This article investigates accent-induced bias in transcriptions of Reference French and Laurentian French (in Canada). In Reference French, high front vowels are phonologically tense /i y/, but they may be phonetically realised as lax [ ɪ ʏ ]. In Laurentian French, lax [ ɪ ʏ ] occur as allophones of /i y/. We compare transcriptions of different groups of coders: native speakers of Reference French, native speakers of Laurentian French, and advanced L2 learners of French who are native speakers of Dutch. Half of the Dutch group was informed about the native variety of the speakers and the other half was not. Results show that perceived accent among the native transcribers is a relatively strong predictor for transcribed sounds. In addition, the Dutch transcribers who were informed about the speaker's variety transcribed more lax vowels in Laurentian French and more tense vowels in Reference French than the Dutch transcribers who were not informed. Native transcribers also showed contextual effects related to the allophonic distribution of the vowels in Laurentian French. These results are indicative of accent-induced bias. The results are analysed in a predictive top-down model to explain the effect of prior experience and information about the language variety in speech perception.

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.

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.

This article proposes a measure of the competitive strength of two rival patterns in the domain of a subgroup of irregular verbs in English. There is competition between simple pasts built on the vowels /æ/ and /ʌ/, and the same competition is found in the domain of past participles. As a result of such competition, the past tensestang(fromsting) was replaced withstung. The /ʌ/ forms are more competitive than the /æ/ forms (Bybee & Slobin 2007,Bybee & Moder 2007). To understand this, we counted the number of types for /æ/ (such assang, rang) and /ʌ/ (such asstung, stuck) in the irregular simple past and did the same in the irregular participle (such assat, hadandsung, done). We calculated a measure of competitiveness for these two patterns incorporating type frequency and token frequency. This measure was used to explain why /ʌ/ forms are more competitive than /æ/ forms.

This paper questions the assumption made in classic Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993 [2004]) that markedness constraints are an innate part of Universal Grammar. Instead, we argue that constraints are acquired on the basis of the language data to which L1 learning children are exposed. This is argued both on general grounds (innateness is an assumption that should not be invoked lightly) and on the basis of empirical evidence. We investigate this issue for six general markedness constraints in French, and show that all constraints could be acquired on the basis of the ambient data. Second, we show that the order of acquisition of the marked structures matches the frequency of violations of the relevant constraints in the input quite well. This argues in favour of a phonological model in which constraints are acquired, not innate, i.e. a model in which grammatical notions such as constraints are derived from language use.

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.

In a language identification task, native Belgian French and native Swiss French speakers identified French from France as their own variety. However, Canadian French was not subject to this bias. Canadian and French listeners didn’t claim a different variety as their own.

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.

In dialectology, it is often necessary to obtain a measure for the level of dialectal accent shown by individual speakers, especially if statistical analysis is needed. This also applies to studies on standard variants which are “coloured” by regiolects or dialects. In this paper I explore the feasibility of letting native speakers judge the degree of accentedness in Low-Alemannic German. Specifically, I investigate whether listeners who speak a similar dialect as the speakers who are evaluated assign different judgements than listeners who do not. A novel methodology is applied, which involves an on-line elicitation task using audio files. This experiment shows that listeners who speak different varieties of German form a homogeneous group, with respect to rating the level of accent., In der Dialektologie wird häufig ein Maß für den Grad des dialektalen Akzents einzelner Sprecher benötigt, insbesondere, wenn eine statistische Analyse benötigt wird. Das gilt auch für Studien über Standardvarietäten, die durch Regiolekte oder Dialekte "gefärbt" sind. In diesem Artikel prüfe ich, inwieweit es möglich ist, Muttersprachler den dialektalen Akzent in nieder-alemannischem Deutsch einschätzen zu lassen. Insbesondere untersuche ich, ob Hörer, die einen ähnlichen Dialekt wie die bewerteten Sprecher sprechen, zu anderen Urteilen kommen als Hörer, die keinen ähnlichen Dialekt sprechen. Eine neuartige Methode mit einer Online-Elizitations-Aufgabe anhand von Audio-Dateien kommt zum Einsatz. Das Experiment zeigt, dass Hörer, die verschiedene Varietäten des Deutschen sprechen, den erhobenen Bewertungen nach eine homogene Gruppe bilden.

This contribution explores a methodological problem in language acquisition studies. Much research in language acquisition has shown that children use statistical learning as a strategy in the acquisition of their native language (Saffran et al. 1996 and many others). Frequency of occurrence is also believed to determine the order of acquisition of phonological structures in the construction of the grammar (Boersma and Levelt 2000, Levelt et al. 2000, van de Weijer and Sloos 2013). How do we obtain the relevant frequency information for acquisition studies?Ideally, we should take into account children's speech or child-directed speech (CDS), depending on the purposes of the investigation. Investigations into the construction of the lexicon and acquisition of the grammar depend on the input, the perception, and the lexical storage of the child, and therefore, frequency data on CDS seem most desirable.