11. Prosodia e Foreign Accent - Prosody and Foreign Accent : Prominenza accentuale e deaccentazione in Italiano e Tedesco come lingue secondeAlessandra Zappoli, 2012, master's thesis Abstract: This thesis investigates the production and acquisition of prosodic contours in Italian learners of German, and German learners of Italian as second languages (L2). The thesis compares speech production in L2 with speech production in the native language (L1). The goal is to verify whether the speech production in L2 is affected by Transfer phenomena that are linked to the phonological properties of the L1. The thesis also tests, in light of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis, whether the direction of acquisition - the acquisition of German as L2, being an L1 speaker of Italian vs. the acquisition of Italian as L2, being an L1 speaker of German – can predict a production in L2 connotated by Foreign Accent (FA). The thesis describes: i) the current state of the art of acquisitional theories of an L2 in adulthood; ii) the theoretical description of the patterns of prosodic prominence in Italian and German within the Autosegmental Theory of Intonation framework; iii) the interaction of the phonological structure with the Information Packaging of the Discourse Structure that differently affects the realization of prosodic patterns in Germanic and Romance languages. Finally, the thesis reports the preliminary results of a production experiment that adopts the paradigm of Swerts et. al (2002) in which participants utter a sequence of Noun-Phrases composed by a Noun and Adjective in which the Information Status rotates between the conditions of New, Given, and Contrastive information. The data highlight the presence of H+L* as the most frequently used Pitch Accent in the production of Italian speakers, that emerges also in the production of the German L2 speakers of Italian; in contrast, the data show the presence of Deaccentuation in the production of L1 speakers of German in correlation with the Given information status of a referent that is not successfully acquired by Italian L1 speakers of German as L2. The data indicate that it appears to be easier to successfully acquire the Italian prosodic system, being a native speaker of German, than vice-versa, supporting the MDH. The facilitatory effect is explainable by the less relevant role of the Discourse Structure in guiding the prominence patterns in Italian, which more heavily relies on the phonological structure, resulting in a less marked prosodic system compared to the prosodic system of German.
Keywords: pitch accents, prosody, foreign accent, prominence, second language acquisition, german, Italian, markedness, speech production
Published in RUNG: 06.12.2021; Views: 1923; Downloads: 0
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13. Scalar Implicaturesscientific monograph Abstract: Scalar implicatures have enjoyed the status of one of the most researched topics in both theoretical and experimental pragmatics in recent years. This Research Topic presents new developments in studying the comprehension, as well as the production of scalar inferences, suggests new testing paradigms that trigger important discussions about the methodology of experimental investigation, explores the effect of prosody and context on inference rates. To a great extent the articles reflect the state of the art in the domain and outline promising paths for future research.
Keywords: Scalar implicature, Lexical scales, Scalar variability, Cross-linguistic variation, Production, Comprehension, Prosody, Context
Published in RUNG: 06.11.2019; Views: 3162; Downloads: 116
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14. Structuring linguistic noise : The children's remarkable capacity for syntactic segmentationArthur Stepanov, invited lecture at foreign university Abstract: How do young children acquiring their native language master complex abstract properties of adult sentences, more specifically, their syntactic structure? A good portion of recent research in child language acquisition is devoted to the nature of 'segmentation' strategies allowing children to deduce some of these abstract structural properties from the linguistic input they are exposed to, and the role of linguistic (e.g. prosodic), cognitive (e.g. working memory, probabilistic) and experience (e.g. bilingualism, music training) factors that affect the segmentation task. In this talk I give a broad outline of this research agenda including our own work and reflect on promising new directions that emerge in this domain.
Keywords: segmentation, prosody, child language
Published in RUNG: 28.06.2019; Views: 3281; Downloads: 0
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15. There is Faith and Faith: prosodic contrast in Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian verb derivationMarko Simonović, 2018, published scientific conference contribution abstract Keywords: Verbs, Prosody, Optimality Theory, Distributed Morphology, Faithfulness, Theme vowels, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian
Published in RUNG: 12.06.2018; Views: 3951; Downloads: 210
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16. The emergence of post-cyclic prosody in loanword integration - Toneless Latinate adjectives in Serbo-CroatianMarko Simonović, 2012, published scientific conference contribution Abstract: A case of exceptional assignment of prosody to loanwords is considered. In SerboCroatian,
where in loanwords the original position of stress is generally preserved in some
way, a small class of Latinate adjectives (e.g., element ‚ arna ¯ ‘elementary’ and person ‚ alna ¯ ‘personal’)
become toneless and they display the postcyclic initial falling accent. An account of
these data is proposed which combines a new approach to postcyclic prosody, which is shown
to go hand in hand with syntactically opaque structures, and a new model of loanword integration,
which views the loanword trajectory as lexicalisation. As a result, an enriched theory of
both domains and their interaction arises to account for the data and shed some additional
light on the position of loanwords in the architecture of the grammar/lexicon.
Keywords: loanword integration, postcyclic prosody, prosody/syntax interface, morphology, lexicon
Published in RUNG: 07.02.2018; Views: 4291; Downloads: 0
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17. Children's early bilingualism and musical training influence prosodic discrimination of sentences in an unknown languageArthur Stepanov, Matic Pavlič, Penka Stateva, Anne Reboul, 2018, original scientific article Abstract: This study investigated whether early bilingualism and early musical training positively influence the ability to discriminate between prosodic patterns corresponding to different syntactic structures in otherwise phonetically identical sentences in an unknown language. In a same-different discrimination task, participants (N = 108) divided into four groups (monolingual non-musicians, monolingual musicians, bilingual non-musicians, and bilingual musicians) listened to pairs of short sentences in a language unknown to them (French). In discriminating phonetically identical but prosodically different sentences, musicians, bilinguals, and bilingual musicians outperformed the controls. However, there was no interaction between bilingualism and musical training to suggest an additive effect. These results underscore the significant role of both types of experience in enhancing the listeners' sensitivity to prosodic information.
Keywords: prosody, bilingualism, same-different task, French, musical training, acoustics, brain
Published in RUNG: 10.01.2018; Views: 3972; Downloads: 0
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