International audienceIn an experiment spanning a week, American English speakers imitated a Glaswegian (Scottish) English speaker. The target sounds were /t/ and /r/, as the Glaswegian speaker aspirated wordmedial /t/ but pronounced /r/ as a flap. This experiment therefore explored whether speakers could learn to reassign a sound they already produce (the flap) to a new phoneme and to new phonetic contexts. Speakers appeared to learn systematically, as they could generalize to words which they had never heard the Glaswegian pronounce. There was a mix of categorical learning, with the allophone simply switching to a new use, and parametric approximations of the “new” sound. The phonetic context was clearly important, as flaps were produced less successfully when word-initial. And although there was variety in success rates, most speakers learned to produce a flap for /r/ at least some of the time and retained this learning over a week's time. These effects are most easily explained in a hybrid of neo-generative and exemplar models of speech perception and production

This study addresses the relationship between information structure and intonation in French. Using an interactive speech production experiment, it tests the hypothesis that the French initial rise (LHi) is used to mark the left edge of a contrastively focused constituent. Since the occurrence of the initial rise is also known to be sensitive to the length of an Accentual Phrase (AP), AP length was manipulated within the same experiment in a 2 x 2 design. This made it possible to explore the issue of whether the initial rise represents a true marker of focus in the traditional sense, or whether the association is less direct. The results show that focus and phrase length make contributions to the distribution of the initial rise, but with no interaction. It is argued that these findings are incompatible with a model that assumes a direct mapping between focus and the initial rise, and that the relatively weak association can nevertheless be informative in a model of interpretation that integrates multiple probabilistic inputs to initial rise occurrence. These findings represent the first quantitative experimental assessment of focus realization in French in a non-corrective context, and establish a previously undocumented link between the initial rise and discourse-level meaning.

It is now well documented for different varieties of English that the speech production and perception systems rapidly adapt to contextual social cues. This adaptation is sensitive not only to speaker social identity but also to implicit social cues, suggesting that the underlying mechanism is automatic rather than controlled. While it has recently been shown that the interpretation of intonation depends on segmental cues to sociolect within the same utterance, the present study explores whether it also depends on implicit contextual social cues. Starting from the observation that a specific type of intonational contour is used differently in Corsican French and Continental French, we tested whether Corsican French listeners interpret this contour differently depending on which dialectal region is evoked by a visual cue. The results are consistent with this hypothesis, thus providing evidence for implicit social adaption in a new domain of linguistic behavior, specifically, the prosody-meaning interface. We describe an exemplar-based model of our results demonstrating that such models can be readily extended to capture the effects found by the present study.

INTRODUCTION. The distribution of pitch accents in speech is a topic of longstanding importance because it reflects the relationships among different levels of representation: phonology, syntax, semantics, and information structure. The broad tendency for accents to be located on new information is a classic observation, but formalizing the principles that govern accent placement in all cases has proven to be a difficult challenge. In this discussion note, we use experimental data to explore in depth the accent patterns on constructions with stranded prepositions. We extend the model of Schwarzschild 1999 to account for our findings.Function words are prosodically weaker than content words and do not ordinarily carry accents. However, Ladd (1980) notes an interesting class of exceptions. These are cases in which a preposition has been stranded at the end of an infinitival clause in which all other words are given. Ladd's dialogue (1) provides an example.(1) A: Why don't you have some French toast?B: There's nothing to make French toast OUT of.In 1B, the noun French toast is the default location for the nuclear pitch accent by virtue of being prosodically stronger than its neighbors. However, the prosodic prominence of the noun is weak because of its recent mention in the discourse, and the nuclear accent appears on the preposition.Our study concerns a closely related but more tractable set of examples such as 2, in which contextual effects are more carefully controlled.(2) A: Are the children playing their game? B: Paul took down the tent that they play their game in.