The effect of age of acquisition on first- and second-language vowel production was investigated. Eight English vowels were produced by Native Japanese (NJ) adults and children as well as by age-matched Native English (NE) adults and children. Productions were recorded shortly after the NJ participants’ arrival in the USA and then one year later. In agreement with previous investigations [Aoyama, et al., J. Phon. 32, 233–250 (2004)], children were able to learn more, leading to higher accuracy than adults in a year’s time. Based on the spectral quality and duration comparisons, NJ adults had more accurate production at Time 1, but showed no improvement over time. The NJ children’s productions, however, showed significant differences from the NE children’s for English “new” vowels /ɪ/, /ε/, /ɑ/, /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ at Time 1, but produced all eight vowels in a native-like manner at Time 2. An examination of NJ speakers’ productions of Japanese /i/, /a/, /u/ over time revealed significant changes for the NJ Child Group only. Japanese /i/ and /a/ showed changes in production that can be related to second language (L2) learning. The results suggest that L2 vowel production is affected importantly by age of acquisition and that there is a dynamic interaction, whereby the first and second language vowels affect each other.

The current study focused on the production of non-contrastive geminates across different boundary types in English to investigate the hypothesis that word-internal heteromorphemic geminates may differ from those that arise across a word boundary. In this study, word-internal geminates arising from affixation, and described as either assimilated or concatenated, were matched to heteromorphemic geminates arising from sequences of identical consonants that spanned a word boundary and to word-internal singletons. Word-internal geminates were found to be longer than matched singletons in absolute and relative terms. By contrast, heteromorphemic geminates that occurred at word boundaries were only longer than matched singletons in absolute terms. In addition, heteromorphemic geminates in two word phrases were typically “pulled apart” in careful speech; that is, speakers marked the boundaries between free morphemes with pitch changes and pauses. Morpheme boundaries in words with bound affixes were very rarely highlighted in this way. These results are taken to indicate that most word-internal heteromorphemic geminates are represented as a single long consonant in the speech plan rather than as a consonant sequence. Only those geminates that arise in two word phrases exhibit phonetic characteristics that are fully consistent with the representation of two identical consonants crossing a morpheme boundary.

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki . Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki . These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation, demonstrating that in the absence of words people can use vocalizations to communicate a variety of meanings.

Social meaning is not conveyed through words alone, but also through how words are produced phonetically. This paper investigates the role of loudness and pitch in determining the perception of politeness-related judgments in Korean. It has been proposed that high pitch is universally associated with polite or deferential social meanings. In contrast to this, Experiment 1 examined the perceptual effect of pitch and found no effect. Experiment 2 tested the effect of loudness, and found that listeners associate quieter speech with deference. Finally, Experiment 3 investigated the simultaneous effects of loudness and pitch, and found again that loudness had a consistent effect, whereas pitch only had a weak effect. Analyses of individual differences suggest that in contrast to loudness, which is interpreted uniformly across Korean listeners, pitch has more variegated social meanings: Some listeners associate high pitch with deferential meaning, others associate low pitch with deferential meaning. Thus, we find loudness to be a more unambiguous indicator of deferential speech than pitch. These findings shed light on how different acoustic properties contribute to the indexing of social stances, and they suggest that the role of pitch in conveying politeness may have been overstated in past research.