Individual speakers' speech patterns differ from one another, despite presumably similar language input. What are the sources of this individual variability? In this dissertation, I explore sources of individual differences in pronunciation of coronal obstruents (/s/, /t[superscript h]/, /c[superscript h]/, /c/) at the ends of nouns in Korean.…

Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as "socio-indexical structure," has been the cornerstone of sociophonetic research over the last several decades. Research…

Theoretical interest in the relation between speech production and perception has led to research on whether individual speaker-listeners' production patterns are linked to the information they attend to in perception. However, for prosodic structure, the production-perception relation has received little attention. This dissertation investigates…

Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

This dissertation investigated the caregiving relationships between infants and nonparental caregivers in early childcare settings through the lens of attachment and language behaviors. This study sought to provide an opportunity to extend our understanding of the socioemotional factors that influence children's development in their daily lives.…

This dissertation examines the relative effects of phonetic salience and phonological prominence on speech sound processing. Three test cases, respectively, investigate the processing of consonants versus vowels by speakers of German, Hebrew, and Amharic; the processing of aspirated versus unaspirated stops by speaker of Spanish and Thai; and the…

The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language. Strong cross-linguistic tendencies in syllable size and shape are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure, a type which is also privileged in abstract models of the syllable. Syllable patterns such as those found in Itelmen "qsa?txt??"…

This dissertation begins with the observation of a typological asymmetry within phonological patterns related to phonetic naturalness. Patterns that are rooted within existing tendencies of perception and/or production--in other words, patterns that are phonetically "natural"--are common in phonological typology and seen in a variety of…

This dissertation describes and analyzes voice and valence-altering operations in Falam Chin, a Tibeto-Burman language of Burma. The data is explained within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), which supplies several key concepts particularly useful for generalizing the behavior of the Falam Chin operations. The first is RRG's…

The present study is concerned with language contact between Creole English and Spanish spoken by bilingual West Indians who live in Panama City, Panama. The goal of this study is to examine the speech patterns of monolinguals of Creole English and Spanish and Spanish-Creole English bilinguals in the local communities of this region, by employing…

This dissertation examines three processes affecting consonants in child speech: harmony (long-distance assimilation) involving major place features as in "coat" [kouk]; long-distance metathesis as in "cup" [p[wedge]k]; and initial consonant deletion as in "fish" [is]. These processes are unattested in adult phonology, leading to proposals for…

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of "ways of speaking" in the Nanti speech community of Montetoni, in southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, between 1999 and 2009. In the context of this study, a way of speaking is a socially meaningful, conventionalized sound pattern, manifest at the level of the utterance, that expresses the…