Ellen Broselow

Parameter setting in second language phonology and syntax

This paper reports on studies of second language acquisition in two domains, phonology and syntax. The phenomena investigated were the acquisition by native speakers of Hindi, Japanese, and Korean of two areas of English: in phonology, the mastery of particular syllable onset clusters, and in syntax, the acquisition of the binding patterns of reflexive anaphors. Both these areas are ones for which multi-valued parameters have been posited to account for the range of variation across natural languages. The paper presents evidence that acquisition in these two areas is quite similar: at a certain stage of acquisition learners seem to arrive at a parameter setting that is midway between the native and the target language settings. This effect occurs both when the target language employs a less marked setting than the native language and when the target language setting is more marked than that of the native language.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE UNMARKED IN SECOND LANGUAGE PHONOLOGY

This paper discusses the simplification of forms ending in obstruents by native speakers of Mandarin, in particular two effects that are not obviously motivated by either the native- or the target-language grammars: a tendency to devoice final voiced obstruents and a tendency to maximize the number of bisyllabic forms in the output. These patterns are accounted for within Optimality Theory, which describes a grammar as a set of universal, ranked constraints. It is argued that the devoicing and bisyllabicity effects result from universal markedness constraints that are present in all grammars but that are masked in the learners native-language grammar by the effects of higher ranking constraints.

Syllable weight: convergence of phonology and phonetics

In some languages, syllable weight depends exclusively on vowel length, while in others, coda consonants add weight to syllables. In this paper we assume that syllable weight is reflected in moraic structure, and that weight-bearing coda consonants are the exclusive dependents of a mora, while weightless consonants share a mora with the preceding vowel. We consider whether the durations of vowels and coda consonants reflect the distinction between a segment which occupies its own mora and a segment that shares a mora. We examine three patterns of coda weight, reflected in stress assignment: in Hindi, codas always contribute to syllable weight; in Malayalam, coda consonants are always weightless; and in Levantine Arabic, coda weight is contextually determined, with word-internal codas contributing to syllable weight following a short vowel, but weightless following a long vowel. These phonological patterns translate into different moraic representations of CVC and CVVC syllables across the different languages. We examine the durations of vowels and coda consonants in CV, CVC, CVV and CVVC syllables in Hindi, Malayalam and Levantine Arabic, and find that in all three languages, segments that we represent as mora-sharing are significantly shorter than segments that we represent as occupying an independent mora. The striking differences in durational patterns across the three languages correlate with the different moraic representations proposed on the basis of phonological patterning.

Unmarked structures and emergent rankings in second language phonology

One of the most interesting features of language contact situations involves the appearance of systematic patterns that are not manifested in either of the two languages in contact. A full analysis of such patterns may require constraint rankings that differ from those of both the native and the target languages. I examine possible sources of these constraint rankings with respect to the devoicing of final obstruents in learners whose native language contains either no final consonants or no final obstruents, and whose target language contains both voiced and voiceless final obstruents. I conclude that the interlanguage ranking follows from the frequency of different input structures, given the assumption that constraint rankings are stochastic (Boersma & Hayes, 2001), and that final devoicing is an effect of positional markedness constraints. I then consider possible alternative explanations of interlanguage final devoicing: as a reflection of native language rankings of positional faithfulness constraints; as an effect of perceptual filtering; and/or as a function of articulatory difficulty of sustaining voicing in final position.

Prosodic Phonology and the Acquisition of a Second Language

This paper discusses several patterns of incorrect production and perception of a foreign language, and offers accounts of these error patterns in terms of a particular theory of the representation of phonological structure. All the errors discussed involve some aspect of prosody, and are argued to result from differences in constraints on prosodic structure in the native language and the foreign language. These error patterns are interesting from two perspectives. First, the cases discussed provide justification for the claim that linguistic theory is relevant to second language (L2) acquisition by presenting evidence that the errors of language learners can be seen as perfectly comprehensible and even predictable given particular theoretical constructs. Second, the patterns discussed provide evidence for the relevance of data from L2 acquisition to the concerns of linguistic theory. Specifically, I argue that error patterns may provide evidence for particular analyses of the native language grammar, evidence that may not be available from the study of the native language alone.

Salish double reduplications: Subjacency in morphology

ConclusionsIn the preceding sections I have argued that Lushootseed and Thompson/Shuswap differ in certain important ways, and that these differences can be accounted for in a unified fashion by assuming that in Lushootseed the diminutive morpheme is a prefix, while in the Interior Salish languages it is an infix. The differing forms of doubly reduplicated words were argued to follow from these differences in word structure, and the principle of subjacency, interpreted to prohibit the copying of phonemic melodies across two cyclic nodes, was argued to be a universal principle constraining the operation of morphological rules. The larger conclusion suggested by this analysis is that the morphological and the syntactic components of the grammar are not so disparate as they might appear to be at first glance; we can see the same principles operating on the level of the word and the level of the sentence.The analysis presented above involves certain assumptions which deserve further discussion. In particular, it was assumed that infixing is the attachment of a morpheme to a phonological constituent rather than to a morphological constituent; in terms of the infix discussed above, this means that the diminutive in the Interior Salish languages is subcategorized to occur before a stressed syllable rather than before a stem, as in Lushootseed. The infix is not, at least in surface structure, integrated into the tree structure of the word; instead, it is attached in a linear fashion to some element in the phonological representation, and certain operations — the copying of the phonemic melody of a stem, in this case — can take place independently on the phonological and on the morphological tiers. This assumption raises the question of at what level and in what way infixes are related to the other morphemes of a word. A treatment of this question is beyond the scope of this paper; I will note here only that this problem is the same one faced in describing the morphological structure of languages, such as Semitic languages, which make extensive use of nonconcatenative systems of morphology (McCarthy 1981). An analysis of the relationship between the phonological structure and the morphological structure of Salish infixal words should generalize to other, more consistently nonconcatenative languages.

Uh-oh: Glottal Stops and Syllable Organization in Sulawesi 1

Glottal stops pattern differently than other consonants in a number of languages spoken on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In the Makassar languages of South Sulawesi, glottal stop alternates with [k]; in the Kaili-Pomona language Uma of Central Sulawesi, stem-final glottal stop is mobile, apparently metathesizing with material suffixed to the stem; and in the Central Sulawesi Saluan language Balantak, glottal stop is invisible with respect to a particular affix which is normally suffixed to vowel-final stems but infixed to consonant-final stems. I will argue that the various anomalies of the glottal stop result from the fact that glottal stops lack oral place specification; this lack of oral place allows consonants to coalesce with neighboring vowels without loss of place information, and makes glottal stops undesirable onsets in languages (like these) which prefer to locate place contrasts in syllable onsets. 1. Glottal Stop Alternation: Makassar languages The Makassar languages of South Sulawesi include Standard Makassarese (Lakiung), Selayarese, Konjo, Bantaeng, and Turatea. These languages are mutually intelligible but differ in some vocabulary and exhibit some systematic differences in structure. Our focus here is on Makassarese, Selayarese, and Konjo. All three share a restricted syllable structure, allowing only [] and [] in syllable coda, and all three exhibit an alternation between [ ] and [k]. In Makassarese, these two segments are in complementary distribution, [] appearing in coda and [k] in onset position: (1) Makassarese baji ‘good’ bajik-a ‘better’ bajik-a ‘I am good’

Cross‐linguistic interpretation of duration.

In Korean, intervocalic [l] is realized as tap ([tal]/[tar‐i] ‘moon/moon+nom’). In English loanwords, however, intervocalic /l/ is generally adapted as a geminate lateral ([sollo] ‘solo’ but [sara] ‘Sarah’). We present evidence from event‐related potentials supporting an analysis in which Korean listeners perceive intervocalic single [l] (illegal in Korean) as geminate [ll], reinterpreting the English [r‐l] contrast in terms of the Korean [r‐ll] contrast ([dari] ‘bridge’, [dalli] ‘differently’). Korean and English participants heard two sets of oddball paradigms, [ele‐elle] and [ene‐enne]. In both cases, the acoustic difference is the same, 48 versus 98 msec. However, the nasal pair represents a cross‐category contrast in Korean ([kanan] ‘poverty’, [kannan] ‘newborn’) while the lateral pair represents a noncontrastive difference. Consistent with studies showing a stronger mismatch negativity (MMN) to cross‐category changes than to within‐category changes, Korean listeners displayed a significantly larger ...

English focus prosody processing and production by Mandarin speakers

Our study compared the processing and production of English focus prosody by native speakers of English and Mandarin. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and 21 English speakers participated in two tasks. In the processing task, participants responded to instructions that contained natural or unnatural contrastive prosody (Click on the purple sweater; Now click on the SCARLET sweater/Now click on the PURPLE jacket.) In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a white board, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus (Put the yellow arrow over the ORANGE arrow/yellow DIAMOND, please). All adjectives and nouns were bisyllabic trochees. The two groups differed in their realization of focus, with English speakers tending to align the pitch peak with the stressed syllable and Mandarin speakers with the right edge of the focused word. However, comparison of reaction times for the processing task indicated that both groups responded more quickly ...

International teaching assistants’ production of focus intonation

We report on a longitudinal investigation of the realization of English focus by 19 Mandarin-speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Participants read passages containing contrastive information (e.g., The price of a train ticket is twenty dollars, while the price of a bus ticket is eleven dollars), and then responded to the experimenter’s questions (Is the price of a bus ticket twenty dollars?). ITAs were tested within a month of their arrival in the US, and again at the end of their first semester. Overall, the productions of ITAs at both points in time were judged as less natural by native English listeners than the productions of the native speakers of English, though the naturalness of some ITA productions improved at the second sampling. Acoustic analyses of the ITA productions and comparison with the productions of 18 native English speakers revealed a good deal of interspeaker variability in the ITA productions, with several different patterns associated with the “unnatural” productions...