This study documented the realisation of the plosive voicing contrast in terms of VOT and post-plosive f0 in the Afrikaans and Dutch of early bilingual Afrikaans heritage speakers in the...Show moreThis study documented the realisation of the plosive voicing contrast in terms of VOT and post-plosive f0 in the Afrikaans and Dutch of early bilingual Afrikaans heritage speakers in the Netherlands. In partial replication of Coetzee et al. (2018)’s documentation of the contrast in Afrikaans, where f0 is an increasingly more important cue than VOT, this study found effects of the homeland cue reweighting in heritage speakers’ productions. They were more likely to produce phonologically voiced plosives without prevoicing in Afrikaans than in Dutch, but showed large and systematic f0 differences between the two categories in both languages. Their realisations resembled those of older speakers in the homeland most, pointing to slower spread of language innovations to the heritage language community. Findings also suggest that the representations of similar but distinct phonological contrasts in early bilingual speakers’ different phoneme inventories are distinct, but influence each other and may overlap partially.Show less
The glottal stop is frequently used in Finnish but it is usually not considered a phoneme. It participates in sound rules like other phonemes and has prosodic uses in turn-holding and signaling...Show moreThe glottal stop is frequently used in Finnish but it is usually not considered a phoneme. It participates in sound rules like other phonemes and has prosodic uses in turn-holding and signaling syllable boundaries. Studies on Maltese have suggested the glottal stop can occur both as a phoneme and as a prosodic effect (Mitterer et al., 2021). The present study had 28 participants listen and rate the comprehensibility and fluency of utterances with a glottal stop or a glottal stop unpronounced in an online experiment. The participants rated the items without a glottal stop significantly lower than the items with a glottal stop. The ratings were significantly affected by the likelihood that specific suffixes occur with a glottal stop. The findings suggest that a glottal stop between two separate words is a phoneme that only occurs with certain suffixes. The results concerning compound words were inconclusive and the effect of identical vowels around the glottal stop should be further investigated.Show less
For decades an objective within Linguistics as a study field has been to assess the existence or strength of a link between language and thought. The present study focuses on crosslinguistic...Show moreFor decades an objective within Linguistics as a study field has been to assess the existence or strength of a link between language and thought. The present study focuses on crosslinguistic differences of intrusion of the spatial domain within the temporal domain by comparing Native English speakers to Mandarin-English bilinguals. With deviation in linguistic construction of space = time metaphors between the two languages, the main question subject to this study is whether linguistic differences bear influence on the conceptualization of the abstract domain of time. Furthermore, an insight is given in the manner abstract concepts are concreted by the human mind with an emphasis on bilingual processing. As the processing within the bilingual mind has been subjected to much debate over recent year, an attempt to reconcile various views has been laid bare. The present study exists of two replicated tasks which yielded different conclusions in their original state. While the results of the present study remain inconclusive, one task hints at a global difference between Mandarin-English bilinguals' conception of time and English native speakers' conception of time. The other task has not revealed any implication on linguistic processing due to crosslinguistic differences.Show less
For decades an objective for linguistics as a study field has been to assess the existence and/or strength of a link between language and thought. The present study focuses on crosslinguistic...Show moreFor decades an objective for linguistics as a study field has been to assess the existence and/or strength of a link between language and thought. The present study focuses on crosslinguistic differences in observed intrusion of the spatial domain on the temporal domain by comparing English monolinguals toMan darin-English bilinguals. The main question in this study is whether the observed linguistic differences in the temporal domain between Mandarin and English bear influence on the conceptualization of this domain by the human mind. The present study comprises of two replicated experiments. When the two presently replicated experiments were conducted originally they drew deviating conclusions from one another regarding a similar question. While the results of the present study remain inconclusive, results hint at a global difference between Mandarin-English bilinguals’ conception of time and English native speakers’ conception of time based on language. This hint implicates that there might be an underlying effect of language on the mental representation of time. The second experiment has not revealed any implication on linguistic processing due to observed crosslinguistic differences.Show less
This study examines the predictive properties of Dutch prepositions. In a self-paced reading experiment, native speakers of Dutch were presented with verb-final sentences containing five different...Show moreThis study examines the predictive properties of Dutch prepositions. In a self-paced reading experiment, native speakers of Dutch were presented with verb-final sentences containing five different spatial prepositions, combined with both predictable and unpredictable argument nouns and verbs. Results revealed that the unpredictable nouns and verbs caused processing difficulty, indicating that the parser can use information activated at the preposition to form expectations about upcoming material. These results provide support for the theory that sentence processing is incremental and occurs on the basis of constraint accrual.Show less
Awa Pit is a Barbacoan language spoken in Colombia and Ecuador. Although there has been some research on this language before, the exact sibilant system is still up for discussion. In the current...Show moreAwa Pit is a Barbacoan language spoken in Colombia and Ecuador. Although there has been some research on this language before, the exact sibilant system is still up for discussion. In the current study, it is argued that there are two sibilant phonemes in Awa Pit, and that other sibilants are allophones of these two. Additionally, palatalization is put forth as a phonological process and argued to occur under certain circumstances in Awa Pit.Show less
The phonetic-pragmatic interface has provided linguistics with an interesting question that the literature has not yet been able to answer conclusively: Does intonation directly communicate meaning...Show moreThe phonetic-pragmatic interface has provided linguistics with an interesting question that the literature has not yet been able to answer conclusively: Does intonation directly communicate meaning? This thesis describes an exploratory elicitation experiment in which the effects of two pragmatic dimensions on the production of Dutch intonation is examined within three core meanings: “testing”, “selection”, “selection plus”. The productions of native speakers – realised on two-syllable proper names – were recorded in four pragmatic dimension combinations: default or vocative (orientation), and formal or informal (politeness). The meanings and pragmatic dimensions were embodied in situational contexts that served to elicit individual intonation contours for each meaning configuration. Additionally, the effect of word length was considered in a secondary experiment by employing one- and three-syllable proper names in a constant pragmatic environment. Results show a main effect of orientation across core meanings caused by different contextual variables. Politeness yielded only one main effect as a result of the configuration of speaker-hearer relations. Productions were found to be consistent across word lengths. The effects of the pragmatic dimensions are of definite influence on the production of Dutch intonation contours, but they could not be generalised across core meanings due to context discrepancies, indicating the importance of situational background.Show less
This research attempts to investigate the planning process of an utterance. Two experiments have been conducted one with an online speech production task and one with a reading aloud production...Show moreThis research attempts to investigate the planning process of an utterance. Two experiments have been conducted one with an online speech production task and one with a reading aloud production task. The first produced word from the utterances is analysed to give an answer of the research question: how to plan an utterance during online vs reading-aloud speech production? It turned out that at syntactic planning the phrase for both experiments is the preferred unit of planning. Speech onset latencies and initial F0 peaks form evidence for this planning process. Within the first phonological word of the utterances no main effect was found for onset latencies in the reading- aloud task, while this was found in the online speech production task. Furthermore, no main effect was found for the initial F0 peaks in the online speech production task, while this was found for the reading- aloud task. Thus, the planning at phonological level seems to be different for both speech productions tasks.Show less
