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A complex set of facts from the Servigliano dialect of Italian is explained in terms of four phonological processes foirnalized within the framework of Prosodic Phonology. Three of these processes, post-tonic vowel copying, metaphony, and pretonic vowel raising, involve vowel harmony in the clitic group domain (C), are complementary in nature in terms of their targets, and reveal a unique, interesting interplay between prosodic structure, metrical structure, and the feature hierarchy. While post-tonic vowel copying involves a total assimilation in all feature s to a final vowel, the remaining two harmony processes entail a partial assimilation in height to a high final or high stressed vowel, respectively. It is shown that the use of [+high] as the assimilatory feature in metaphony is problematic, since, in conjunction with binary values of the features [low] and [ATR], it fails to straightforwardly capture the scalar nature of this raising process. This inadequacy is due to the use of more than one feature to define the single parameter of vowel height. An alternative model proposed by Clements (1989Clements ( , 1991a represents this parameter in terms of occurrences of a single feature [open] hierarchically organized into tiers dominated by an aperture node. It is shown that the use of occurrences of [open] to define vowel height makes it possible to directly generate metaphonic raising in Servigliano as a scalar, assimilatory phenomenon rather than as a coincidental result.

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Although generalized anxiety has increased among college students, it is unclear what effect this has on language anxiety. While language anxiety has been shown to negatively affect second language achievement, its impact at the level of specific linguistic subdomains has not been evaluated. In what follows, we explore what relationship, if any, exists between Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Foreign Language Anxiety and whether either construct is predictive of L2 Spanish lexical or morphosyntactic development. Results reveal that while foreign language anxiety and generalized anxiety are related, only foreign language anxiety is significantly and negatively predictive of both morphosyntactic and lexical development in the context of instructed L2 Spanish, while general anxiety was only marginally predictive of morphosyntax, but not lexicon.