This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers' Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n = 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n = 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n = 40) took…

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of Thai tones produced by Chinese students learning Thai through the "Tone Application", and conducts an attitude test towards the use of the Tone Application. A comparison of Thai tones pronounced by the participants with 40 native Thai speakers was also conducted. The acoustic…

This paper deals with the study of tone in languages that additionally have a phonological contrastive of quantity, such as vowel length or stress. In such complex word-prosodic systems, tone and the quantity contrast(s) can be fully independent of one another, or they may interact. Both of these configurations are illustrated in this paper, and…

Tonal languages differ in how they use phonetic correlates, e.g. average pitch height and pitch direction, for tonal contrasts. Thus, native speakers of a tonal language may need to adjust their attention to familiar or unfamiliar phonetic cues when perceiving non-native tones. On the other hand, speakers of a non-tonal language may need to…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

Investigating a tone language involves careful transcription of tone on words and phrases. This is challenging when the phonological categories--the tones or melodies--have not been identified. Effects such as coarticulation, sandhi, and phrase-level prosody appear as obstacles to early elicitation and classification of tone. This article presents…

This research examined generality of the phylogenetic rule that birds discriminate frequency ranges more accurately than mammals. Human absolute pitch chroma possessors accurately tracked transitions between frequency ranges. Independent tests showed that they used note naming (pitch chroma) to remap the tones into ranges; neither possessors nor…

This dissertation is a grammar of Rena (ISO bez), a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Tanzania by approximately 600,000 people. Bena is largely undocumented, and though aspects of Bena grammar have been described, there is no usable, detailed treatment of the Bena language. Therefore the goal of this dissertation is provide the first detailed…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

Paper based on data gathered on the Crow reservation during a total residence of 32 months from 1967 - 1970 under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. (VM)

Tone-based classification rules for Igbo nouns need modification because: (1) class 1 nouns (monosyllables with high tones) do not, as claimed, operate differently from other terminal high-tone nouns; and (2) class 6 nouns (di-syllabic with downstep tones) can be accounted for within class 2 and class 3 nouns known as HH and LH nouns). The proper…

A study of the relationships between Chinese dialects based on a quantitative measure of dialect affinity is summarized. First, tone values in all the dialect localities available in the early 1970s were used to calculate the dialectal differences in terms of tone height with respect to the "yin and yang" split. In the late 1970s, calculations of…

The 12th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2019) is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society in Montreal, Canada. The theme of this year's conference is EDM in Open-Ended Domains. As EDM has matured it has increasingly been applied to open-ended and ill-defined tasks…

Representatives from major institutions teaching African languages convened to discuss the design of African language textbooks and to propose guidelines for the writing of new textbooks and evaluation of existing ones. Conference papers include: "Language Acquisition Theory and Materials Construction" (Stephen Krashen); "The Structures of Verbal…