Ulrike Gut

The relationship between syntactic and prosodic organisation in early multiword speech

Speech in children should be viewed as a developing skill. During acquisition the child becomes increasingly capable of organizing linguistic structure at a number of different levels concurrently. One boy seemed to have strategies for simplifying the tasks of speech reception and production. He would incorporate the immediately prior utterance, or some portion of it, intact into his utterance as if to avoid structuring his entire utterance from scratch. Another strategy was to extend his repertoire of structures to express more complex ideas simply by combining two existing structures without reordering any of the elements to match adult syntax. If such strategies are widespread they may account for the recorded facts about the development of childrens question forms. Psychological variables, commonly called performance factors, should not be regarded merely as putting restrictions on the extent to which a childs linguistic knowledge can be expressed. Rather, they affect the manner in which syntactic structures develop. Just as the acquisition of linguistic structure is affected by psychological processes, so is the efficiency of these processes affected in its turn by the childs growing linguistic knowledge.

Non-native prosody : phonetic description and teaching practice

This volume presents an overview of the state of the art in second language prosody learning and teaching. The first part comprises descriptions of non-native intonation, stress and speech rhythm written by experts in the field in a format accessible to language teachers. In the second part, leading teaching practitioners present a variety of methods and exercises in the area of prosody. The volume is accompanied by a CD-ROM with audio examples.

Agile corpus creation

Abstract In the past decades language corpora have become indispensable tools for linguistic research and the development of linguistic theory. However, it is not yet widely acknowledged that the quality of corpus-based research and theories depends crucially on the quality of the corpora, not only in terms of their content and size but especially as far as the accuracy and richness of the annotations are concerned. Neither has much systematic thought gone into the effectiveness of the traditional corpus creation process regarding this problem. This paper proposes a novel approach to corpus creation – agile corpus creation – that addresses the problem of simultaneously maximizing corpus size as well as the quality and quantity of manual and automatic annotations while minimizing the time and cost involved in corpus creation. The central aspects of agile corpus creation lie in the reorganization of the traditional linear and separate phases of corpus design, data collection, data annotation and corpus analysis and in the recognition of potential sources of errors during corpus creation.

Progressive Aspect in Nigerian English

This study explores the system of progressive aspect marking in educated adult speakers of Nigerian English (NigE), which has been claimed to differ distinctly from that of other varieties of English. A total of 4,813 progressive constructions drawn from the International Corpus of English (ICE)–Nigeria were analyzed and compared with data from the ICE–Great Britain and previous studies. In addition, the acceptability of progressive constructions was tested in a questionnaire study. The results show both distinct stylistic variation in the use of progressives in NigE and some systematic differences from their use in British English. The corpus-based study further reveals some extended use of the progressive in NigE such as in connection with verbs referring to habitual nonbounded durative activities or stative verbs. Many of these patterns of extended use might be explained by referring to the interplay between aspects of first and second language usage (such as that of Igbo and English). Results from the questionnaire survey suggest that only a subgroup of these extended progressives is considered acceptable by NigE speakers.

Introduction to English phonetics and phonology

Contents: Introduction: Phonetics and Phonology - Speech production - English phonology: phonemes, syllables and words - English phonology: intonation - Acoustic properties of English - Speech perception.

PROSODIC MARKING OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE BY MALAYSIAN SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

Various researchers have shown that second language (L2) speakers have difficulties with marking information structure in English prosodically: They deviate from native speakers not only in terms of pitch accent placement (Grosser, 1997 ; Gut, 2009 ; Ramirez Verdugo, 2002) and the type of pitch accent they produce (Wennerstrom, 1994 , 1998 ) but also with regard to the phonetic realization of these pitch accents (Atterer & Ladd, 2004 ; O’Brien & Gut, 2010 ). This study investigates the prosodic strategies of first language (L1) Malay speakers of English for marking given and new discourse elements. Ten Malay speakers of English were recorded reading out a 179-word story that contained six given and six new words. Additionally, 10 Malay speakers read aloud a 152-word story containing six given and six new words in Malay. The given-new word pairs were analyzed both auditorily and acoustically in terms of type of pitch accent, syllable duration, phonetic realization of the rise, and pitch peak alignment. The results show that the Malay speakers of English produce longer rises on new than on given discourse elements but do not show different pitch accents, syllable duration, pitch peak alignment, or steepness of rises on the two types of words. The average extent and steepness of the rises as well as the pitch peak alignment are almost identical in Malay and the L2 English of Malay speakers, which suggests direct influence from the L1. However, differences in the type of pitch accents produced and the similarities to the patterns produced by other L2 speakers suggest further influencing factors.

Phonetics/phonology in third language acquisition: Introduction

This special issue provides a state-of-the-art overview of the theories, models and research methodology in the phonological acquisition of a third language (L3). The present contributions have been selected from a number of papers given at a satellite workshop of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), which was held at the University of Freiburg (Germany) from 3 to 4 August 2007 and was organised by Ulrike Gut (now Augsburg), Grit Mehlhorn (Leipzig) and Magdalena Wrembel (Poznań). Its aim was to explore new methods and fresh theoretical input for investigating and modelling third language phonological acquisition. The field of L3 acquisition research is a very young discipline in linguistics and one that is still struggling with terminological difficulties and inconsistencies. There is as yet not even an agreed definition of the term ‘third language’ (see De Angelis, 2007, pp. 8 12). Research on L3 acquisition was sparked off by the growing empirical evidence for and the recognition of the fact that the acquisition process of a foreign language is systematically different depending on whether another foreign language has previously been learned or not. Thus, the term ‘third language’ is typically used to stress the differences between ‘second’ (L2) and ‘further’ language acquisition and is often used to refer to any language acquired after a ‘second language’ has been learned, however imperfectly. In order not to exclude a speaker’s fourth, fifth, etc. language, De Angelis (2007, p. 11) favours the somewhat longer and more awkward term ‘Third or Additional Language Acquisition’ for this phenomenon. The papers in this special issue, although using the shorter terms ‘third language’ or ‘L3’, share the common definition of L3 acquisition as being distinct from L2 acquisition due to the availability of prior linguistic knowledge and language learning experience. So far, research on phonology and phonetics in Third or Additional Language Acquisition has been very limited in scope. Current theories and the few extant empirical investigations of the acquisition of the phonology of a foreign language focus primarily on the influence of the native language on the acquisition of a second language or a third language and typically conceptualise this influence as a limiting and restricting factor based on negative transfer and interference. Positive effects of previously learned languages such as already acquired meta-linguistic competence and the application of specific learner strategies gained in L2 acquisition to L3 learning have as yet remained largely unexplored. Three of the papers in this special issue present research on the question whether the L2 exerts a positive influence onto the L3 and explore which factors might facilitate this kind of positive transfer. Ulrike Gut investigates possible sources and directions of cross-linguistic influence in the phonologies of four trilingual speakers in her contribution ‘Cross-linguistic influence in L3 phonological acquisition’. Focussing on vowel reduction and speech rhythm in L3 English and L3 German, she finds conflicting evidence for L2 L3 cross-linguistic influence. Her data suggest International Journal of Multilingualism Vol. 7, No. 1, February 2010, 1 3

Interactions between three phonological subsystems of young multilinguals: the influence of language status

ABSTRACT This study examines the interactions between three vocalic subsystems of multilingual speakers and explores the role language status might play in explaining variability across them. Eight 14-year-olds raised in Germany, who had learnt English at school for 6 years and Polish for 1 year, participated in the study. They were divided into three groups: children of German parents, children with one Polish-speaking parent but with German as the main home language, and children with two Polish-speaking parents and Polish as their main home language. The young multilinguals read a word list and performed a delayed repetition task in all their languages, with both tasks containing tokens of /i, ɪ, u, ʊ, ϵ, æ/. The results show a great degree of individual variability in the production of the vowels in all three languages and point to language status as one factor shaping the phonological subsystems of these multilinguals. The findings are interpreted within the framework of the Dynamic Systems Theory.

Discovering regularities in non-native speech

This paper presents ongoing collaborative research which focuses on the application of computational linguistic techniques to the analysis of a corpus of native and non-native speech. The aim of this research is to use computational tools for modelling phonological acquisition and representation to identify regularities and sub-regularities between different speaker groups. The corpus is being collected and annotated at different levels as part of ongoing research into the acquisition of prosody by non-native speakers at the University of Bielefeld. The computational tools have been designed and implemented at University College Dublin as part of a development environment for modelling, testing and evaluating phonotactic descriptions of lesser-studied languages.

The Acquisition of The Systematic Use of Pitch by German/English Bilingual Children

Much of the interest in bilingual first language acquisition has focused on the question whether or not very young bilingual children are able to differentiate between their two languages. Many researchers argue that bilingual children start with a unitary system in the acquisition of phonology. However, most studies in this area are restricted to the segmental level where cross-linguistic similarities in early inventories provide ambiguous results. Thus, investigations on a suprasegmental level such as the system of pitch might offer new evidence. It has been proposed that the use of pitch is acquired very early by children. Experimental studies in this area, however, have produced contradictory results. This study investigates the acquisition of the systematic use of pitch by German/English bilingual children. The longitudinal data show that the linguistic use of pitch patterns is far from completed by age 2;5. By investigating the acquisition of the intonational marking of questions from 2;5 to 4;3 for one of the children, it was possible to gather evidence for two separate phonological systems.