This dissertation documents and analyzes phonetic and phonological features of Gua, an under-documented, understudied and nearly-endangered Guang language, spoken in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The language has two dialects, Anum and Boso. The data for this dissertation is from the Boso dialect spoken in the Boso community. The dissertation…

This dissertation investigates Voice Onset Time (VOT), which serves as an essential property for differentiating plosive consonants in L1 and L2 Mandarin Chinese. It surveys VOT variations and demonstrates that they are affected by several phonetic and phonological properties, e.g., lexical tone, place of articulation (POA), speech rate,…

It is known that individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) may show no problems with regard to what is said (e.g., lexical content) but tend to have difficulties in how utterances are produced, i.e., they may show prosodic impairments. In the present study, we focus on the use of prosodic features to express grammatical meaning. Specifically, we…

This study provides a systematic phonetic analysis of the basic entities of Kabardian prosodic units above the word and investigates the predictability of prosodic units from grammatical and discourse factors. This dissertation is the first extensive description of Kabardian prosody and grammar based on natural data. This study proposes that…

Every language has its own rhythm. Unlike many other languages in the world, English depends on the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed or weakened syllables recurring in the same phrase or sentence. Mastering the rhythm of English makes speaking more effective. Experiments have shown that we tend to hear speech as more rhythmical…

This paper outlines a method of auditory and acoustic analysis for determining the tonemes of a language starting from scratch, drawing on the author's experience of recording and analyzing tone languages of north-east India. The methodology is applied to a preliminary analysis of tone in the Thang dialect of Khiamniungan, a virtually undocumented…

This dissertation investigates the prosodic and intonational characteristics of Western Cham (three letter code for International Organization for Standardization's ISO 639-3 code: [iso=cja]), an Austronesian language in the Chamic sub-group. I examine acoustic variables of prominence at word and postlexical levels: syllable duration, pitch…

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This…

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

Function (i.e., grammatical) words very frequently lack word-level stress and display phonetic reduction relative to content (i.e., lexical) words. However, word-class (function vs . content) may not be the only factor that affects phonetic realization of function words; prosodic and syntactic context can also play a significant role in…

The monograph contains two papers. The first presents a generative grammar for verbal forms in French. It consists of an ordered set of rewrite rules and a set of tables. It generates all existing verbal forms without generating any non-existing ones. The departure from an ordinary generative grammar lies in the use of a tabular form for…

This book is intended to be an introduction to the sound system of the Spanish language. The book is descriptive in nature and presents a true picture of the language as it is spoken by native speakers from a wide variety of dialect zones. The book is divided into five parts and 25 chapters. Part one, Phonetics and Phonology," includes the…