Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behaviora... more Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task (SRT), which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal con...
Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two put... more Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two putative deaccenting contexts, post-focal regions and presupposed embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception experiment showed that such words are not recognized above a just-noticeable-difference baseline. The results confirm that accents are deleted in the contexts concerned and that accent location contrasts are neutralized.
This chapter covers prosodic features of languages across Southwestern, Central, and Northern Asi... more This chapter covers prosodic features of languages across Southwestern, Central, and Northern Asia. One representative language from each of the four main language families is passed in review, Turkish (Turkic), Mongolian (Mongolic), Persian (Indo-European), and Georgian (Kartvelian). Owing to a lack of descriptive coverage of the prosody of languages in Central Asia, no comprehensive surveys are provided. The discussion focuses on the word and sentence prosodic structures of each of the four languages, with occasional brief excursions to related languages. The languages in this area are mainly non-tonal, while contrastive lexical stress is rare across the area, and may be controversial or marginal where it was reported earlier. Vowel harmony is pervasive in Mongolic and Turkic. In all four cases, the discussion includes the expression of focus, whether in the word order or the prosody. A final section is devoted to the intonational expression of interrogativity and related meanings.
Prominence in Persian words is generally referred to as 'word stress'. An important aspect in whi... more Prominence in Persian words is generally referred to as 'word stress'. An important aspect in which the notion of Persian 'word stress' is flawed is that the location of 'stressed' syllables is entirely governed by syntax. That is, neither is it the case that 'stressed' syllables are in any way determined in the lexicon, nor is it the case that they are determined in the phonology, whether lexical or post-lexical, Persian 'stress' functions in syntax much as would a segmentally encoded particle.
Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two put... more Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two putative deaccenting contexts, post-focal regions and presupposed embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception experiment showed that such words are not recognized above a just-noticeable-difference baseline. The results confirm that accents are deleted in the contexts concerned and that accent location contrasts are neutralized.
Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the Persian word accent disappears in two put... more Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the Persian word accent disappears in two putative 'deaccenting' contexts, post-focal regions and 'presupposed' embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception experiment showed that such words are not recognized above a just-noticeable-difference (JND) baseline. The results confirm that accents are deleted and that accent location contrasts are neutralized.
A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic pr... more A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on the consonant contrast, while two language groups, Dutch and Japanese, significantly outperformed the three other language groups (French, Indonesian and Persian) on the prosodic contrast. Since only Dutch and Japanese words have unpredictable stress or accent locations, the results are interpreted to mean that stress “deafness” is a property of speakers of languages without lexical stress or tone markings, as opposed to the presence of stress or accent contrasts in phrasal (post-lexical) constructions. Moreover, the degree of transparency between the locations of stress/tone and word boundaries did not appear to affect our results, despite earlier claims that this should have an effect. This finding is of significance for speech processing, language acquisition and phonological theory.
"In a previous production experiment, post-focus compression
(PFC) of F0 and intensity were foun... more "In a previous production experiment, post-focus compression
(PFC) of F0 and intensity were found to be present in Persian.
It was also shown that F0 and duration were the main
correlates of prosodic focus in Persian. However, the
perceptual relevance of PFC in Persian was not yet clear. The
present paper reports the findings of an experiment on focus
perception in Persian. Native speakers of Persian listened to
sentences produced with focus in different positions as well as
the neutral-focus sentence, and judged the presence and
location of focus. Results show that final focus is identified
much less well than other types of focus, and most of its
confusion is with neutral focus. This shows that the presence
of PFC is a main factor in recognizing prosodic focus in
Persian."
Tone languages use tones to distinguish content words (‘lexical tones’) or morphological features... more Tone languages use tones to distinguish content words (‘lexical tones’) or morphological features (‘grammatical tones’). In many other languages, tones are a feature of prosodic domains like the foot, the phonological phrase, etc., and typically express discourse meanings (‘intonation’). This dissertation presents two novel findings for Persian. First, what has generally been analyzed as ‘word stress’ is a High tone whose location is exclusively governed by syntax. This tonal morpheme distinguishes nominal constituents from verbal ones. Second, independently of this syntactic tone, Persian does in fact have metrical stress. Its iambic feet show up in non-tonal phenomena, including vowel harmony and vowel deletion. Data from production, word recognition and sequence-recall experiments support both conclusions. This study has significant implications for phoneticians, phonologists and syntacticians. From the perspective of prosodic typology, Persian presents a case of coexisting post-lexical tone and word-based metrical structure, whereby the two do not communicate with each other. Because of its unique reflection of syntactic configurations, the Persian tone is an effective probe into language structure.
I show that accent assignment in Persian is both non-metrical and post-lexical, by investigating ... more I show that accent assignment in Persian is both non-metrical and post-lexical, by investigating its behavior in a wide range of contexts. First, the primitive domain of accent assignment is the morphosyntactic word as opposed to the phonological word, which in view of its principally unbounded length, is in tune with its non-metrical nature. Second, the primitive domain of accent assignment is sensitive to processes such as rank shifting of the phrases and clauses for nominalization, indicating its post-lexical nature. This led me to envisage the Persian accent as a tonal version of grammatical elements like segmentally encoded particles/clitics, which target the edges of syntactic constituents.
Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behaviora... more Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task (SRT), which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal con...
Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two put... more Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two putative deaccenting contexts, post-focal regions and presupposed embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception experiment showed that such words are not recognized above a just-noticeable-difference baseline. The results confirm that accents are deleted in the contexts concerned and that accent location contrasts are neutralized.
This chapter covers prosodic features of languages across Southwestern, Central, and Northern Asi... more This chapter covers prosodic features of languages across Southwestern, Central, and Northern Asia. One representative language from each of the four main language families is passed in review, Turkish (Turkic), Mongolian (Mongolic), Persian (Indo-European), and Georgian (Kartvelian). Owing to a lack of descriptive coverage of the prosody of languages in Central Asia, no comprehensive surveys are provided. The discussion focuses on the word and sentence prosodic structures of each of the four languages, with occasional brief excursions to related languages. The languages in this area are mainly non-tonal, while contrastive lexical stress is rare across the area, and may be controversial or marginal where it was reported earlier. Vowel harmony is pervasive in Mongolic and Turkic. In all four cases, the discussion includes the expression of focus, whether in the word order or the prosody. A final section is devoted to the intonational expression of interrogativity and related meanings.
Prominence in Persian words is generally referred to as 'word stress'. An important aspect in whi... more Prominence in Persian words is generally referred to as 'word stress'. An important aspect in which the notion of Persian 'word stress' is flawed is that the location of 'stressed' syllables is entirely governed by syntax. That is, neither is it the case that 'stressed' syllables are in any way determined in the lexicon, nor is it the case that they are determined in the phonology, whether lexical or post-lexical, Persian 'stress' functions in syntax much as would a segmentally encoded particle.
Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two put... more Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two putative deaccenting contexts, post-focal regions and presupposed embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception experiment showed that such words are not recognized above a just-noticeable-difference baseline. The results confirm that accents are deleted in the contexts concerned and that accent location contrasts are neutralized.
Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the Persian word accent disappears in two put... more Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the Persian word accent disappears in two putative 'deaccenting' contexts, post-focal regions and 'presupposed' embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception experiment showed that such words are not recognized above a just-noticeable-difference (JND) baseline. The results confirm that accents are deleted and that accent location contrasts are neutralized.
A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic pr... more A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on the consonant contrast, while two language groups, Dutch and Japanese, significantly outperformed the three other language groups (French, Indonesian and Persian) on the prosodic contrast. Since only Dutch and Japanese words have unpredictable stress or accent locations, the results are interpreted to mean that stress “deafness” is a property of speakers of languages without lexical stress or tone markings, as opposed to the presence of stress or accent contrasts in phrasal (post-lexical) constructions. Moreover, the degree of transparency between the locations of stress/tone and word boundaries did not appear to affect our results, despite earlier claims that this should have an effect. This finding is of significance for speech processing, language acquisition and phonological theory.
"In a previous production experiment, post-focus compression
(PFC) of F0 and intensity were foun... more "In a previous production experiment, post-focus compression
(PFC) of F0 and intensity were found to be present in Persian.
It was also shown that F0 and duration were the main
correlates of prosodic focus in Persian. However, the
perceptual relevance of PFC in Persian was not yet clear. The
present paper reports the findings of an experiment on focus
perception in Persian. Native speakers of Persian listened to
sentences produced with focus in different positions as well as
the neutral-focus sentence, and judged the presence and
location of focus. Results show that final focus is identified
much less well than other types of focus, and most of its
confusion is with neutral focus. This shows that the presence
of PFC is a main factor in recognizing prosodic focus in
Persian."
Tone languages use tones to distinguish content words (‘lexical tones’) or morphological features... more Tone languages use tones to distinguish content words (‘lexical tones’) or morphological features (‘grammatical tones’). In many other languages, tones are a feature of prosodic domains like the foot, the phonological phrase, etc., and typically express discourse meanings (‘intonation’). This dissertation presents two novel findings for Persian. First, what has generally been analyzed as ‘word stress’ is a High tone whose location is exclusively governed by syntax. This tonal morpheme distinguishes nominal constituents from verbal ones. Second, independently of this syntactic tone, Persian does in fact have metrical stress. Its iambic feet show up in non-tonal phenomena, including vowel harmony and vowel deletion. Data from production, word recognition and sequence-recall experiments support both conclusions. This study has significant implications for phoneticians, phonologists and syntacticians. From the perspective of prosodic typology, Persian presents a case of coexisting post-lexical tone and word-based metrical structure, whereby the two do not communicate with each other. Because of its unique reflection of syntactic configurations, the Persian tone is an effective probe into language structure.
I show that accent assignment in Persian is both non-metrical and post-lexical, by investigating ... more I show that accent assignment in Persian is both non-metrical and post-lexical, by investigating its behavior in a wide range of contexts. First, the primitive domain of accent assignment is the morphosyntactic word as opposed to the phonological word, which in view of its principally unbounded length, is in tune with its non-metrical nature. Second, the primitive domain of accent assignment is sensitive to processes such as rank shifting of the phrases and clauses for nominalization, indicating its post-lexical nature. This led me to envisage the Persian accent as a tonal version of grammatical elements like segmentally encoded particles/clitics, which target the edges of syntactic constituents.
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(PFC) of F0 and intensity were found to be present in Persian.
It was also shown that F0 and duration were the main
correlates of prosodic focus in Persian. However, the
perceptual relevance of PFC in Persian was not yet clear. The
present paper reports the findings of an experiment on focus
perception in Persian. Native speakers of Persian listened to
sentences produced with focus in different positions as well as
the neutral-focus sentence, and judged the presence and
location of focus. Results show that final focus is identified
much less well than other types of focus, and most of its
confusion is with neutral focus. This shows that the presence
of PFC is a main factor in recognizing prosodic focus in
Persian."
(PFC) of F0 and intensity were found to be present in Persian.
It was also shown that F0 and duration were the main
correlates of prosodic focus in Persian. However, the
perceptual relevance of PFC in Persian was not yet clear. The
present paper reports the findings of an experiment on focus
perception in Persian. Native speakers of Persian listened to
sentences produced with focus in different positions as well as
the neutral-focus sentence, and judged the presence and
location of focus. Results show that final focus is identified
much less well than other types of focus, and most of its
confusion is with neutral focus. This shows that the presence
of PFC is a main factor in recognizing prosodic focus in
Persian."