Barış Kabak

Perceptual Distortions in the Adaptation of English Consonant Clusters: Syllable Structure or Consonantal Contact Constraints?

We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second languge (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux, Kakehi, Hirose, Pallier, & Mehlers (1999) results that suggested that listeners perceive epenthetic vowels within consonantal sequences that violate the phonotactics of their L1. Korean employs at least two kinds of phonotactic restrictions: (i) syllable structure restrictions that prohibit the occurence of certain consonants in coda position (e.g., *[c.], *[g.]), while allowing others (e.g., [k.], [l.]), and (ii) consonantal contact restrictions that ban the co-occurrence of certain heterosyllabic consonants (e.g., *[k.m]; *[l.n]) due to various phonological processes that repair such sequences on the surface (i.e., /k.m/ → [ŋ.m]; /l.n / → [l.l]). The results suggest that Korean syllable structure restrictions, rather than consonantal contact restrictions, result in the perception of epenthetic vowels. Furthermore, the frequency of co-occurrence fails to explain the epenthesis effects in the percept of consonant clusters employed in the present study. We address questions regarding the interaction between speech perception and phonology and test the validity of Steriades (2001 a,b) Perceptual-Mapping (P-Map) hypothesis for the Korean sonorant assimilation processes. Our results indicate that Steriades hypothesis makes incorrect predictions about Korean phonology and that speech perception is not isomorphic to speech production.

The phonological word and stress assignment in Turkish

It is generally believed that Turkish stress is always word-final. Closer examination, however, reveals several types of exceptions to this pattern involving both roots and affixes. This paper proposes a unified analysis of regular and irregular stress in Turkish that crucially depends on our definition of the Phonological Word. In addition, we discuss stress in constituents beyond the word, and provide evidence for the Clitic Group as well as the Phonological Phrase. Finally, we also briefly discuss vowel harmony and a set of syllabification phenomena, and show how the latter, in particular, provide independent support for the proposal we advance here.

Turkish Suspended Affixation

Abstract This article presents well-formedness conditions on Turkish coordinate constructions with suspended affixation (SA), where certain bound morphemes are omitted from all conjuncts other than the final one while maintaining their semantic scope over the whole construction. It is argued that the legitimacy of verbal conjuncts with suspended affixation neither directly falls out from the conjuncts being the complement of the copula, nor is it due to the type of agreement paradigm. Instead, the article provides a unified analysis that accounts for SA in both verbal and nonverbal constructions based on the notion of morphological words. The morphological word is comprised of a stem plus optional affixes, the right edge of which can terminate a morphological string independently from agreement markers. Accordingly, SA is licit if the omission of inflectional affixes in nonfinal conjuncts results in a morphological word. It is further shown that the terminal morphemes must be overtly marked in nonfinal conjuncts although they can be null elsewhere, and derivational morphemes cannot be suspended. Finally, it is argued that affixes that exhibit tight phonological cohesion with their stems resist suspension, suggesting that the degree of morphological bonding correlates with the degree of phonological cohesion.

Phonological domains : universals and deviations

This book puts together recent theoretical developments in prosodic phonology by leading specialists and presents language particular investigations on the morphosyntax-phonology interface by expert linguists working on diverse languages such as German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish.

Processing (un-)predictable word stress: ERP evidence from Turkish

This paper investigates the way the predictability of prosodic patterns in a particular language influences the processing of stress information by native speakers of that language. We extend previous findings where speakers of languages with predictable stress had difficulties to process and represent stress information when confronted with a language with distinctive stress and investigate how the co-existence of a predictable stress pattern and exceptions to that regularity within a single language influences prosodic processing. The stress system of Turkish constitutes an instructive test case since it employs predictable stress on the final syllable of a prosodic word (e.g., mısır “corn”) and some exceptional nonfinal stress (e.g., mısır “Egypt”). Results from an event-related potential (ERP) study on stress violations in Turkish trisyllabic words showed asymmetrical ERP responses for different stress violations: Stress violations with final stress produced an N400 effect whereas violations with nonfinal stress produced a P300 effect. The application of the predictable pattern to words with lexical stress led to lexical costs and the application of exceptional stress to words with default stress to effects reflecting the evaluation of this pattern. Although final stress constitutes no alternative pattern for words with exceptional stress, participants have difficulties to judge this pattern as incorrect. In contrast, exceptional stress patterns are detected easily when applied incorrectly to words that normally receive final stress. These findings demonstrate nicely the co-existence of two phonological processing routines in Turkish speakers. Furthermore, the variability of stress patterns does not affect prosodic processing in general but instead leads to differential effects in stress perception. We conclude that stress predictability does not homogenously result in the so-called “stress deafness” effects in stress processing, but that it rather emerges only for the default stress pattern.

Lexical encoding of L2 tones: The role of L1 stress, pitch accent and intonation

Native language prosodic structure is known to modulate the processing of non-native suprasegmental information. It has been shown that native speakers of French, a language without lexical stress, have difficulties storing non-native stress contrasts. We investigated whether the ability to store lexical tone (as in Mandarin Chinese) also depends on the first language (L1) prosodic structure and, if so, how. We tested participants from a stress language (German), a language without word stress (French), a language with restricted lexical tonal contrasts (Japanese), and Mandarin Chinese controls. Furthermore, German has a rich intonational structure, while French and Japanese dispose of fewer utterance-level pitch contrasts. The participants learnt associations between disyllabic non-words (4 tonal contrasts) and objects and indicated whether picture–word pairs matched with what they had learnt (complete match, segmental or tonal mismatch conditions). In the tonal mismatch condition, the Mandarin Chinese controls had the highest sensitivity, followed by the German participants. The French and Japanese participants showed no sensitivity towards these tonal contrasts. Utterance-level prosody is hence better able to predict success in second language (L2) tone learning than word prosody.

Listeners use vowel harmony and word-final stress to spot nonsense words : a study of turkish and french

Speakers’ knowledge of sound distributions and rhythmic alternations that systematically characterize wordhood in individual languages is known to aid word segmentation. Vowel harmony is one such regularity that dictates a set of co-occurrence restrictions on vowel features within a word, e.g. in Finnish and Turkish, all vowels within a word must agree on the front-back dimension. In these languages opposite values of the front/back feature on adjacent vowels automatically signals a word boundary, as disharmony is not expected within single words. Accordingly, Finnish speakers detect target words faster when the preceding syllable contains a vowel that differs on the front-back dimension from the vowels in the target (Suomi et al., 1997). Likewise, the culminative nature of accent, which requires that every lexical word has one primary stress, is also known to aid speech segmentation. Especially when primary stress is fixed to a particular position that demarcates word boundaries, as in word initialor word final-stress languages, this may provide the language user with invaluable cues to detect word boundaries. This idea found support in a previous study which reported a facilitatory effect of word-initial stress in Finnish (Vroomen et al., 1998). Since primary stress overlaps with the beginning of words in this language, it is difficult to know whether facilitation effects are due to (i) the demarcative function of stress per se, which prompts a word boundary before the stressed syllable, or (ii) the well-known primacy of word onsets in general. Instead, we test Turkish and French, where stress typically falls on the word-final syllable, and thus separate the demarcative function of stress from the primacy of word onsets. We demonstrate that listeners employ word-final stress cues to progressively postulate an upcoming word boundary. Furthermore, we show that detection of a vowel harmony mismatch, which unlike word-final stress constitutes a regressively operating cue for a word boundary, is robustly exploited only by Turkish listeners. This finds a straightforward explanation since Turkish, but not French, has front-back vowel harmony. Thus, we show that listeners can exploit abstract phonological regularities in their native language to segment even nonsense words. We conducted a target-detection task that employed a 2x2x2 design with the factors language (Turkish/French), stress (stress2/stress3) and harmony (match/mismatch). Participants heard a 5-syllable CVCVCVCVCV auditory string that consisted of a trisyllabic pre-target string and a disyllabic target (Table 1). The pre-target string and the target were both nonwords in Turkish and French, and were harmonious, i.e. each contained only front or only back vowels. However, in half of the cases the pre-target and the target matched on the frontness/backness dimension, their concatenation contained only front vowels or only back vowels (the harmony-match conditions). In the remaining cases, the pre-target contained front vowels and the target contained back vowels or vice versa (harmony-mismatch). Furthermore, the location of stress in the pre-target was manipulated so that it fell either on the 2/3 syllable (stress2 vs. stress3 conditions). On each trial, the participants were prompted with a visual target, e.g. pαvo, which was then followed by an auditory 5syllable nonsense string, e.g. golushopαvo. The task was to determine whether the auditory string contained the visual prompt as quickly and accurately as possible (the correct response was always ‘Yes’ for experimental items).

From edgemost to lexical stress: Diachronic paths, typology and representation

Abstract This article presents a theory of the development of lexical accents in edgemost stress systems, and their representations. It is shown that, first, the directionality of different levels of prominence at the word and above-word level, and, second, morphologization as a result of prosodic weakening work together for the development of various types of lexical accents. Our proposal makes a number of predictions with respect to: (a) whether a system will develop lexical accents, (b) their initial shape when the default stress is fossilized, and (c) their subsequent reshaping. To substantiate our predictions, we examine approximately fifty edgemost stress systems. Furthermore, we propose a two-dimensional theory of the representation of lexical accents that distinguishes between the morphological affiliation of an accent and its locus of pronunciation. The soundness of our theory is tested not only on the grounds of its explanatory power in capturing diachronic changes, but also with respect to its empirical coverage of contemporary theoretical issues concerning the representation of lexical accents.

Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels

Abstract Evaluating Trudgills correlation of phoneme inventory size with social factors, this paper highlights the role of phonological structure in the acquisition of phonological contrast, with particular reference to Turkic and Korean vowel inventories. Factors such as social dominance, isolation, and community size are shown not to provide plausible explanations for the loss of primary long vowels in most Turkic languages and their preservation in a few others, nor for the neutralization which long and short vowels currently undergo in Korean. It is suggested that such changes in phoneme inventories can be better understood as a result of phonetic and phonological processes involving the contrastive features and phonological contexts that define the phonemes in question. Processes referring to vowel length in Turkic and Korean are argued to have obscured its contrastive status in the organization of phonological knowledge by the speakers of these languages.

Prosodically constrained non-local doubling

Abstract In this article, we discuss non-local doubling in Greek and Turkish, a hitherto unanalysed aspect of these languages, and its implications for the interfaces. In non-local doubling, the reduplicated item is not located next to its base but at some other position in the clause depending on language-specific constraints. Interestingly, the attested type of doubling is not purely sensitive to syntactic nodes as in other languages (e.g. Dutch, Afrikaans), since we show that it targets a prosodic constituent. We argue that both Greek and Turkish employ an empty emphatic morpheme which has a two-legged exponence: One exponent is some phonological phrase in a clause and the other is its clone, placed farther than its source at the right periphery of the clause. We further discuss the variation between Greek and Turkish in terms of the prosodic structure of the two languages, showing that the differences lie in (i) the prosodic status of the copied element, (ii) the relative degree of free word order, and (iii) the properties of the right periphery (postverbal/postsentential). We thus propose that doubling is a general mechanism found across languages, and it is not only morphological or syntactic units, but also prosodic ones that can serve as input to this ubiquitous process.