This thesis deals with developmental, universal, grammatical, and functional factors involved in the acquisition of L2 syllable structure. More specifically, using speech data from Spanish and Chinese learners of Swedish, the thesis examines the production and development of syllable onsets and codas—that is, syllable margins. In doing so, the present work draws on various theoretical considerations and empirical findings from research on L1 and L2 acquisition, phonology and phonetics, language variation and language typology. The thesis includes three empirical studies, all of which are based on longitudinal conver­sational data. Study I deals with the acquisition of word-initial /sC(C)/ onsets by one native Spanish speaker, whereas Study II and Study III focus on the acquisi­tion of word-final codas by three native Chinese speakers. Study I and Study II both showed that onset and coda length and phonetic environment are influen­tial factors in the production of syllable structure, while sonority may not be as reliable a predictor of production difficulty. Next, both Study I and Study III provide evidence of a U-shaped rather than linear development of pronunciation accuracy. This pattern is interpreted as an effect of initial increase in fluency, with more focus on content and less on form. In addition, Study III showed that L2 proficiency is related to the epenthesis-deletion differential. An increasing ratio of epenthesis-to-deletion is the first-order indicator of increasing L2 profi­ciency during early stages of acquisition, but increased target-like production becomes the first-order indicator of development at later stages. Finally, Study III showed that learners are aware of potential ambiguity resulting from simpli­fication in different grammatical/functional categories. Codas that are essential for the retention of semantic information are preserved through higher accuracy rates and higher relative levels of epenthesis errors.

Denna rapport är en del av en longitudinell studie av psykolingvistisk ålder och språklig medvetenhet hos elever i årskurs 1 på två olika skolor i Vallentuna kommun. I studien har material från de tre senaste projektåren bearbetats. Syftet med undersökningen var att undersöka huruvida fonologisk träning enligt den s.k. Bornholmsmodellen under elevernas tid i 6-årsklass återspeglar sig i ökad språklig medvetenhet och högre psykolingvistisk ålder i årskurs 1. Vidare undersöktes om den fonologiska träningen kan ha påverkat barnens arbetsminne. Två typer av test användes: UMESOL för kartläggning av fonologisk medvetenhet och ITPA, ett standardiserat test av psykolingvistiska färdigheter. Resultaten visar att det finns ett klart samband mellan fonologisk träning enligt Bornholmsmodellen i förskolan och elevernas språkliga medvetenhet i grundskolan. Vidare visar resultaten att även om minnesträningen i Bornholmsmodellen inte direkt påverkat resultaten vid ITPA, så finns det ett starkt samband mellan minnestestet i ITPA och elevernas prestation vid UMESOL.

In this experiment, subjects had to rate the "prominence" of each of the syllables of 20 versions of the same utterance produced by men, women and children at various levels of vocal effort. The ratings were correlated with measurements of the SPL of the fundamental, spectral emphasis, vowel duration, F0max and F0 rise from the previous syllable. Together with ratings of the perceived vocal effort at which the utterances had been produced, these measurements were used to obtain the possible contributions of vocal effort, prosodic distinctness, and vowel duration to the perceived prominence. Together, these accounted for half of the variance. This was compared with the possible contribution of the linguistic structure of the utterance, which accounted for slightly more of the variance. The predictions of a model based on this analysis came closer to the mean than the average subject.

The four experiments reported concern the amount and domain of lengthening associated with focal accents in Swedish. Word, syllable and segment durations were measured in read sentences with focus in different positions. As expected, words with focal accents were longer than nonfocal words in general, but the amount of lengthening varied greatly, primarily due to speaker differences but also to position in the phrase and the word accent distinction. Most of the lengthening occurred within the stressed syllable. An analysis of the internal structure of stressed syllables showed that the phonologically long segments-whether vowels or consonants-were lengthened most, while the phonologically short vowels were hardly affected at all. Through this nonlinear lengthening, the contrast between long and short vowels in stressed syllables was sharpened in focus. Thus, the domain of focal accent lengthening includes at least the stressed syllable. Also, an unstressed syllable immediately to the right of the stressed one was lengthened in focus, while initial unstressed syllables, as well as unstressed syllables to the right of the first unstressed one, were not lengthened. Thus, we assume the domain of focal accent lengthening in Swedish to be restricted to the stressed syllable and the immediately following unstressed one.

This is a study about how one-year-old Swedish-learning infants presumably use probabilistic information, such as prosody and phonotactic regularity, in segmentation of speech. The variables studied were the Swedish tonal word accents I & II and the distributional regularities of within-word and between-word consonant clusters in Swedish infant-directed speech. The results – which were not as clear-cut as the results obtained in earlier experiments on English-learning infants – suggest that 12-month old Swedish infants might be sensitive to prosodic cues to word boundaries: in experiment 1, altering the phonotactics of the stimuli reversed the infants’ preference for word accent types. However this was not confirmed in experiment 2, instead there was a general preference for listening at the accent II words. The results also suggest that 12-month old Swedish infants might not use phonotactic cues to word boundaries to the extent as expected: in experiment 1 and 2, altering the word accent types did not reverse the infants’ preference for phonotactics. Instead, both in experiment 1 and 2, there was a general preference for listening at the within-word stimuli. When compared with earlier research these findings indicate that infants, besides being able to integrate multiple statistical cues to word boundaries, might early in life be assisted by pattern-recognition in speech segmentation.

Two experiments were designed to examine 12-month-old Swedish-learning infants’ ability to use phonotactic and word accent cues to word boundaries. Twenty-five infants were tested using the so-called Visual Preference Procedure. The stimuli were CVC.CVC (experiment 1) and CVC.CVCCVC nonsense words (experiment 2). The word accent of the stimuli signalled either a single word-like unit or two separate units. Also, the cross-syllabic C.C clusters of the stimuli were either typically occurring within words or across word boundaries. The infants looking times at images of objects, presented along the nonsense words, were measured. Compared with results of similar experiments on English-learning infants, the results of the present study were not clear-cut: the infants did not specifically respond to word boundary cues. Instead, a preference for accent 2 stimuli and stimuli with typical word internal phonotactics was found.

It is shown that the energy required in order to articulate manual and oral gestures at a given rate varies in proportion with the fifth power of linear body size, while the energy supply varies with its second power. This provides for a better understanding of the differences in peripheralness observed in the formant frequencies of vowels in speech articulated more or less forcefully by men, women and children.