LINGUIST List 8.299

Sat Mar 1 1997

Books: Phonetics/Phonology, Psycholinguistics

Editor for this issue: Susan Robinson <suelinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Kristi Long, Phonetics/Phonology
2. Kristi Long, Psycholinguistics

New book- Phonetics/Phonology

Jun, Sun-Ah; The Phonetics and Phonology of Korean Prosody:
Intonational Phonology and Prosodic Structure; 0-8153-2558-4; cloth;
264 pages; $65; Garland Publishing

 Korean speech rhythms differ in interesting ways from those of
English, especially in the role of intonationally defined prosodic
groupings, which influence the pronunciation of consonants and vowels
as profoundly as does stress in English. This account of Korean
intonational rhythms is based on experiments that suggest a hierarchy
of intonationally defined groupings, which exert different influences
on the consonants and vowels at their edges. For example, the smaller
accentual phrase affects the pronunciation of a class of consonants
which are voiceless (sounding like Spanish "p" or "ch") in
phrase-initial position, but become voiced (like English "b" or "j")
in phrase-medial position. The larger intonational phrase also affects
these consonants by making exceptions to the generalization that they
will be pronounced as nasals (like French "m" or "gn") when they occur
before another nasal. Other experiments show that speakers vary the
intonational groupings that they assign to any string of words, in
ways that reflect influence from many other aspects of the utterance
including overall speech tempo, the words' syntactic structure and
relative predictability, and the signalling of narrow focus of
attention on any particular word. Significantly, the influence of
focus of attention was paramount, contrary to many current linguistic
theories which propose syntactic structure as the primary determinant
of prosodic rhythms.

E-mail: infogarland.com

New book-Psycholinguistics

Tsimpli, Ianthi-Maria; The Prefunctional Stage of First Language
Acquisition: A Crosslinguistic Study; 0-8153-2561-4; cloth; 266
pages; $59; Garland Publishing

This book accounts for the early stages of first language acquisition
within the Principles and Parameters framework. The main arguments
concern the nature of early grammars in relation to the constraints
that Universal Grammar imposes on them and in relation to the lack of
parameterisation which, in turn, is based on the absence of the
categories responsible for crosslinguistic variation, namely the set
of functional categories. The argument regarding the absence of
parameterisation gives rise to important predictions insofar as
similarities across languages at the early stage of development are
concerned. Accordingly, the theory is tested against acquisition data
from a number of languages: English, French , Greek, German, Spanish,
and Irish.

E-mail: infogarland.com