Mikko Kuronen

Second language prosody and its development: connection between different aspects

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the development of L2 prosody and, in particular, whether different aspects can affect each other. Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish took part in a pronunciation and oral skills course and were recorded for various speaking tasks before and after the experimental intervention. Read-aloud declarative sentences (statements) from nine learners were acoustically analysed for several tonal and temporal aspects, focusing on the marking of primary stress. The results reveal that the learning of Swedish tonal word accent 2 (H*LH) facilitates other tonal developments towards native-like utterance intonation. A link between tonal and temporal developments in the marking of primary stress was, however, not found, but the duration measurements suggest that articulation rate and tonal developments may be connected. The study’s implications for teaching and future research regarding any L2 – not only Swedish – include that aspects of learning L2 prosody should not be treated as separate, and that more emphasis should be placed on the possible connections between the learning of different aspects.

Hard-core thinnings of germ-grain models with power-law grain sizes

Random sets with long-range dependence can be generated using a Boolean model with power-law grain sizes. We study thinnings of such Boolean models which have the hard-core property that no grains overlap in the resulting germ‒grain model. A fundamental question is whether long-range dependence is preserved under such thinnings. To answer this question, we study four natural thinnings of a Poisson germ‒grain model where the grains are spheres with a regularly varying size distribution. We show that a thinning which favors large grains preserves the slow correlation decay of the original model, whereas a thinning which favors small grains does not. Our most interesting finding concerns the case where only disjoint grains are retained, which corresponds to the well-known Matérn type-I thinning. In the resulting germ‒grain model, typical grains have exponentially small sizes, but rather surprisingly, the long-range dependence property is still present. As a byproduct, we obtain new mechanisms for generating homogeneous and isotropic random point configurations having a power-law correlation decay.