This study examined whether phrasal prosody can impact toddlers' syntactic analysis. French noun-verb homophones were used to create locally ambiguous test sentences (e.g., using the homophone as a noun: [le bébésouris] [a bien mangé] - [the baby mouse] [ate well] or using it as a verb: [le bébé] [sourità sa maman] - [the baby] [smiles to his mother], where brackets indicate prosodic phrase boundaries). Although both sentences start with the same words (le-bebe-/suʁi/), they can be disambiguated by the prosodic boundary that either directly precedes the critical word /suʁi/ when it is a verb, or directly follows it when it is a noun. Across two experiments using an intermodal preferential looking procedure, 28-month-olds (Exp. 1 and 2) and 20-month-olds (Exp. 2) listened to the beginnings of these test sentences while watching two images displayed side-by-side on a TV-screen: one associated with the noun interpretation of the ambiguous word (e.g., a mouse) and the other with the verb interpretation (e.g., a baby smiling). The results show that upon hearing the first words of these sentences, toddlers were able to correctly exploit prosodic information to access the syntactic structure of sentences, which in turn helped them to determine the syntactic category of the ambiguous word and to correctly identify its intended meaning: participants switched their eye-gaze toward the correct image based on the prosodic condition in which they heard the ambiguous target word. This provides evidence that during the first steps of language acquisition, toddlers are already able to exploit the prosodic structure of sentences to recover their syntactic structure and predict the syntactic category of upcoming words, an ability which would be extremely useful to discover the meaning of novel words.

Dissatisfied with traditional grading, we developed a grading system to directly assess whether students have mastered course material. We identified the set of skills students need to master in a course, and provided multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of each skill.We describe in detail how we implemented the system for two undergraduate courses, Introductory Phonetics and Phonology I. Our goals were to decrease student stress, increase student learning and make students' study efforts more effective, increase students' metacognitive awareness, promote a growth mindset, encourage students to aim for mastery rather than partial credit, be fairer to students facing structural and institutional disadvantages, reduce our time spent on grading, and facilitate complying with new accreditation requirements.Our own reflections and student feedback indicate that many of these goals were met.

When processing a string of syllables in Mandarin Chinese, tone information needs to be taken into account in order to identify possible words. However, most of the previous studies on processing of tone use monosyllables, which might underestimate the role of tone information. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of tone in contexts where it is maximally informative. To this end, we conduct a set of 3 experiments. Using corpus data, we show in experiment 1 that tone is more informative on disyllables than monosyllables. In experiment 2, we use existing corpus data as well as newly acquired speech data to define two alternative measures of tone frequency for disyllables: ditone sequence frequency (the likelihood of encountering a given sequence of two tones on a disyllabic word) and tone bigram frequency (the likelihood of encountering a given sequence of two tones in running speech, regardless of word boundaries). Based on these results, we investigate in iii experiment 3 the role of tone sequences in disambiguating two segmentally identical disyllabic word candidates that differ only in tone. Using a priming paradigm, we presented native speakers of Mandarin with a disyllabic sequence that was tonally ambiguous between two lexical entries. We show that tone frequency plays a separate role from word frequency and interferes with word frequency information during the processing of disyllables in Mandarin. When word frequency and tone frequency did not favour the same candidate, a tonally-matched prime reduced the likelihood of picking the candidate with the matching tone. Results suggest that listeners are sensitive to the overall likelihood of encountering a given sequence of tones in running speech, regardless of word boundaries (tone bigram frequency).iv The thesis of Isabelle Lin is approved.

English aspiration is influenced by word structure: in general, a voiceless stop following s is unaspirated (des[t]royed), but it can be aspirated if a prefix-stem boundary intervenes (dis[tʰ]rusts) (Baker, Smith & Hawkins 2007). In a production study of 110 words prefixed with dis-or mis-, we show that even in prefixed words, there is variation (dis[k]laimers ~ dis[kʰ]laimers), and that aspiration in such words is correlated with word and stem frequency. The more frequent the word, the less likely aspiration, but the more frequent the stem, the more likely aspiration. This contrasting frequency effect is characteristic of the type of competition Hay posits between whole-word lexical access and morphologically decomposed lexical access (Hay 2003): frequent words will tend to be accessed as wholes (and therefore behave as though there is no prefix-stem boundary), but frequent stems will encourage decomposed, prefix + stem access. In order to test whether there is active online competition, as opposed to simply frequency effects that are somehow lexicalized, we also conduct a priming experiment. We find that exposing participants to other prefixed words encourages them to aspirate target words, as compared to when they have been exposed to similar but non-prefixed words.These results provide evidence for active online competition.

This study aims to quantify the relative contributions of phonetic categories and acoustic detail on phonotactically induced perceptual vowel epenthesis in Japanese listeners. A vowel identification task tested whether a vowel was perceived within illegal consonant clusters and, if so, which vowel was heard. Cross-spliced stimuli were used in which vowel coarticulation present in the cluster did not match the quality of the flanking vowel. Two clusters were used, /hp/ and /kp/, the former containing larger amounts of resonances of the preceding vowel. While both flanking vowel and coarticulation influenced vowel quality, the influence of coarticulation was larger, especially for /hp/.