Stop contrast acquisition in child Kriol: Evidence of stable transmission of phonology post Creole formation.

Many Aboriginal Australian communities are undergoing language shift from traditional Indigenous languages to contact varieties such as Kriol, an English-lexified Creole. Kriol is reportedly characterised by lexical items with highly variable phonological specifications, and variable implementation of voicing and manner contrasts in obstruents (Sandefur, 1986). A language, such as Kriol, characterised by this unusual degree of variability presents Kriol-acquiring children with a potentially difficult language-learning task, and one which challenges the prevalent theories of acquisition.

Two-part vowel modifications in Child Directed Speech in Warlpiri may enhance child attention to speech and scaffold noun acquisition.

Study 1 compared vowels in Child Directed Speech (CDS; child ages 25-46 months) to vowels in Adult Directed Speech (ADS) in natural conversation in the Australian Indigenous language Warlpiri, which has three vowels (/i/, /a/, /u). Study 2 compared the vowels of the child interlocutors from Study 1 to caregiver ADS and CDS. Study 1 indicates that Warlpiri CDS vowels are characterised by fronting, /a/-lowering, -raising, and increased duration, but not vowel space expansion.

Difficulties in decoupling articulatory gestures in L2 phonemic sequences: the case of Mandarin listeners' perceptual deletion of English post-vocalic laterals.

Nonnative or second language (L2) perception of segmental sequences is often characterised by perceptual modification processes, which may "repair" a nonnative sequence that is phonotactically illegal in the listeners' native language (L1) by transforming the sequence into a sequence that is phonotactically in the L1. Often repairs involve the insertion of phonetic materials (epenthesis), but we focus, here, on the less-studied phenomenon of perceptual deletion of nonnative phonemes by testing L1 Mandarin listeners' perception of post-vocalic laterals in L2 English using the triangulating methods of a cross-language goodness rating task, an AXB task, and an AX task. The data were analysed in the framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM/PAM-L2), and we further investigated the role of L2 vocabulary size on task performance.

Voice onset time and constriction duration in Warlpiri stops (Australia).

This paper presents a first detailed analysis of the Voice Onset Time (VOT) and Constriction Duration (CD) of stops /p t ʈ c k/ and flap /ɽ/ in the Indigenous Australian language Warlpiri as spoken in Lajamanu Community, in Australia's Northern Territory. The results show that Warlpiri stops are realised as voiceless, long-lag stops word-initially, as well as word-medially, where /p t k/ are also characterised by CDs in excess of 100 ms. This is similar to what has been reported for Kriol, and for the emerging mixed language Light Warlpiri, also spoken in the community, and by some of the participants.

Pause acceptability indicates word-internal structure in Wubuy.

Words in polysynthetic languages, such as the Australian language Wubuy, can be semantically complex and translate into whole phrases in analytic languages such as English. This raises questions about whether such words are like words in English, or whether they are more like phrases. In the following, we examine Wubuy speakers' knowledge of word-internal morphological complexity in a word-preference task, in which we test the acceptability of complex words into which artificial pauses have been embedded at a range of morphological junctures.

Consonantal timing and release burst acoustics distinguish multiple coronal stop place distinctions in Wubuy (Australia).

Substantial research has established that place of articulation of stop consonants (labial, alveolar, velar) are reliably differentiated using a number of acoustic measures such as closure duration, voice onset time (VOT), and spectral measures such as centre of gravity and the relative energy distribution in the mid-to-high spectral range of the burst. It is unclear, however, whether such measurable acoustic differences are present in multiple place of articulation contrasts among coronal stops. This article presents evidence from the highly endangered indigenous Australian language Wubuy, which maintains a 4-way coronal stop place contrast series in all word positions.

Discrimination of Multiple Coronal Stop Contrasts in Wubuy (Australia): A Natural Referent Consonant Account.

Native speech perception is generally assumed to be highly efficient and accurate. Very little research has, however, directly examined the limitations of native perception, especially for contrasts that are only minimally differentiated acoustically and articulatorily. Here, we demonstrate that native speech perception may indeed be more difficult than is often assumed, where phonemes are highly similar, and we address the nature and extremes of consonant perception.