Geoffrey S. Nathan

Clicks in a Chinese nursery rhyme

This paper reports on the use of nasalized post-alveolar clicks in a special version of a Chinese nursery rhyme, used in two different so-called dialect areas in China. In one, initial velar nasals are replaced with the clicks, while in Mandarin the nasalized clicks are inserted at the beginning of words with zero initials.

FRANÇOIS DELL & MOHAMED ELMEDLAOUI, Syllables in Tashlhiyt Berber and in Moroccan Arabic (Kluwer International Handbooks in Linguistics 2). Dordrecht & Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Pp. xvi + 384. ISBN: 1-4020-1076-1

This book is a monograph-length description of major aspects of the phonological system of Tashlhiyt Berber, and, to a lesser extent, that of Moroccan Arabic. The two authors have been working together on these languages for a number of years, and the second is a native speaker of both languages. Although Arabic is well known and widely studied, Berber is much less so, and even Moroccan Arabic is not well documented. However, Berber became something of a cause célèbre with the publication of the classic definition of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). For those who follow phonological theory, the elegant description of the remarkable syllabification system in Berber was probably one of the most persuasive aspects of the new way of looking at the world occasioned by Optimality Theory (the other was probably the analysis of infixation in Tagalog – equally elegant, and, to most, persuasive). In a nutshell, Tashlhiyt Berber allows any consonant at all to function as the nucleus of a syllable under the appropriate circumstances. This leads to things that one would not normally expect, such as syllabic voiceless stops. A remarkable list of such words appears, for example, on p. 145, where we find words such as /t-!bttn=t/ ‘she lined it’(where ‘-’ indicates morpheme boundary, ‘!’ pharyngealization, and ‘=’ a clitic boundary), syllabified as follows: [t.bt.tnt],1 and /t-žbd-t/ ‘you pulled’, syllabified [tž-btt]. Of course, if voiceless stops can be nuclei, so can other obstruents, such as fricatives: /t-šb©/ ‘she whipped’, [tš.b©.], /i-sbV/ ‘he painted’ [is.bV] (p. 144). While the book does not contain a great deal of phonetic detail (there are no spectrograms, nor are there any narrow transcriptions of the kind that readers of this journal might look for), the data itself is sufficiently fascinating that readers interested in finding out more about this family of languages could use the data in here as a jumping-off point for further instrumental and fine phonetic study. The authors make a number of theoretical phonological points that are of interest to both phonologists and those phoneticians who study the relation between phonetic reality and the perceptual realities underlying the physical description. There is a significant difference between the line of argumentation in this book and that found in traditional generativephonological descriptions of languages, in that virtually no time is spent arguing for underlying representations through the use of alternations found in verb or noun paradigms (which could arguably be due to ‘leftover’ patterns inherited from a series of historical sound changes, such as the Great English Vowel Shift in English). Instead the authors

Vowel space development in a child acquiring English and Spanish from birth

To date, research on bilingual first language acquisition has tended to focus on the development of higher levels of language, with relatively few analyses of the acoustic characteristics of bilingual infants’ and childrens’ speech. Since monolingual infants begin to show perceptual divisions of vowel space that resemble adult native speakers divisions by about 6 months of age [Kuhl et al., Science 255, 606–608 (1992)], bilingual childrens’ vowel production may provide evidence of their awareness of language differences relatively early during language development. This paper will examine the development of vowel categories in a child whose mother is a native speaker of Castilian Spanish, and whose father is a native speaker of American English. Each parent speaks to the child only in her/his native language. For this study, recordings made at the ages of 2;5 and 2;10 were analyzed and F1−F2 measurements were made of vowels from the stressed syllables of content words. The development of vowel space is co...

Acquisition of stress and pitch accent in English–Spanish bilingual children

Although understanding of prosodic development is considered crucial for understanding of language acquisition in general, few studies have focused on how children develop native‐like prosody in their speech production. This study will examine the acquisition of lexical stress and postlexical pitch accent in two English–Spanish bilingual children. Prosodic characteristics of English and Spanish are different in terms of frequent stress patterns (trochaic versus penultimate), phonetic realization of stress (reduced unstressed vowel versus full unstressed vowel), and frequent pitch accent types (H* versus L*+H), among others. Thus, English–Spanish bilingual children’s prosodic development may provide evidence of their awareness of language differences relatively early during language development, and illustrate the influence of markedness or input frequency in prosodic acquisition. For this study, recordings from the children’s one‐word stage are used. Durations of stressed and unstressed syllables and F0 p...