Katherine Blake presented a paper titled:  "Phonological markedness effects on noun-adjective word order in Italian" at the 2020 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2020, a zoom conference organized the the Linguistics Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz, held September 12-20, 2020.

Paper Abstract:

In Italian, word order within a {noun, adjective} pair is often flexible. While the default order is postnominal, for many adjectives, prenominal word order is also available. For example, the pair piccola citta` ∼ citta piccola ` ‘small city’ can occur either order, without a change in meaning.

This work presents a corpus study that aims to determine if this syntactic variation is phonologically conditioned, in other words, whether there’s evidence that speakers exploit flexible word order to avoid phonologically-phenomena. Results indicate that flexible word order is used to avoid stress clash, but not hiatus or light-final constituents.

Rachel Vogel presented a paper titled  "A unified account of two vowel devoicing phenomena: the case of Cheyenne" at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2020)  held virtually Sep 18-20, 2020.  

Paper Abstract:  

This paper examines two processes of vowel devoicing (VD) in Cheyenne (Plains Algonquian, spoken in Montana and Oklahoma). The first applies phrase-finally and thus meets cross-linguistic and phonetic expectations for VD, while the second appears to conflict with such expectations.

I propose that with a Stratal OT approach, both can in fact be treated as a single well-motivated phenomenon distributed across different strata.

Francesco Burroni presented a poster titled "Prominence clash induces localized delays in production, not rhythmic readjustments" at the 17th Biennial Conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology (LapPhon17), held virtually July 6-8, 2020.

Poster Abstract:

In the phonological literature prominence clash is assumed to induce rhythmic readjustments in the first word of a clashing pair. These effects are attributed to stress shift, aka the Rhythm Rule (e.g. Liberman & Prince 1977, Nespor & Vogel 1977, 1989), or to pitch accent deletion with early pitch accent insertion (e.g. Gussenhoven 1991). Phonetic studies of clash, however, have failed to observe the expected correlates of stress shift (e.g. Vogel et al. 1995, Grabe & Warren 1995) and are not fully compatible with pitch accent-based accounts (e.g. Horne 1990 vs Tilsen 2012).

Italian, for example, is often assumed to display clash-driven rhythmic effects (e.g. Krämer 2009), but there is just a single phonetic study, limited to two speakers, that supports this view (Farnetani & Kori 1983). We conducted two acoustic studies with Italian speakers and found no evidence of prominence shift or deletion in measures of duration, F0, or intensity.

To the contrary, we observed an increase of duration in the final vowel/syllable of word 1 in clashing word pairs. We also did not observe any effects on word 2 in clashing pairs. Accordingly, we argue that the main correlate of clash is a localized slowing of speech rate, not prominence shift or deletion.

Methods:

In Experiment 1, 16 speakers of Italian produced 10 x 36 unique trials elicited from visual stimuli (i.e. pictures) representing a three-word noun phrase consisting of a numeral (w0), a target noun with final stress (w1, caffè ‘coffee’, città ‘city’, and colibrì ‘hummingbird’), and a color term with different stress used to manipulate clash (w2).

In Experiment 2, 8 speakers of Italian produced an identical number of similar sequences, with stress varied in w1 (e.g. colibrì ‘hummingbird’ vs. colùbro a type of snake vs. càlibro ‘caliber’). The effects of clash were analyzed with Linear Mixed Effects regressions, with word and speaker as random factors.

Results:

In Experiment 1 we found no significant effects of clash on duration, RMS intensity, or F0 of the initial vowel/syllable of w1. For example [ka] in caffè is not different before néri /vérdi vs bordó /marróni. Surprisingly, durations of the final vowel/syllable of w1 were longer in clash environments, contra the predictions of rhythmic readjustment analyses. For a subset of participants, vowel formants were also more extreme in clash, suggesting hyper-articulation.

Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Exp. 1 and in addition it was found that clash had no effect on the duration, F0, intensity, or formants of the initial vowel of w2. For example, néri after colibrì is not different from néri after colùbri. This shows that clash effects are not manifested on the second word of the clashing pair.

Conclusions:

Rhythmic analyses of prominence clash were not supported by our data: phonetic evidence for prominence shift or prominence deletion was not observed. Instead, the effects of clash on duration and vowel quality in the final syllable of w1 indicate slowing of speech rate and hyper-articulation.

The observation that clash has effects on w1 but not w2 has consequences for analyses based on prosodic boundaries, which can be adapted to generate a variety of predictions. We discuss how the observed effects of prominence clash can be modeled in the framework of Articulatory Phonology (e.g. Gafos 2006, Tilsen 2019).

Francesco Burroni, Sireemas Maspong, Dr. Pittayawat  Pittayaporn, and Pimthip Kochaiyaphum presented a poster titled "Interactions of initial geminates and stress: a case study of Pattani Malay" at the 17th Biennial Conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology (LapPhon17), held virtually July 6-8, 2020.

Francesco and Siri's poster was co-authored with Dr. P. Pittayaporn (a Cornell Phonetics Lab alumnus) and Pimthip Kochaiyaphum of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

Paper Abstract:

Pattani Malay is an oft-cited example of a language with moraic initial geminates (Hajek & Goedemans, 2003; Topintzi, 2008), a claim based on an alleged stress shift process.

This paper provides empirical evidence against previous impressionistic descriptions (e.g., Yupho, 1989) that initial geminates cause stress to move from the final to the initial syllable of disyllables. Phonologically speaking, a larger vowel distribution and absence of the neutral /ɨ/ in the final syllable point to prominence on the final syllable regardless of the type of onset.

Phonetically, our acoustic analysis also reveals that words with and without initial geminates display similar acoustic profiles. More specifically, the final syllable always has significantly longer duration in all utterance positions, and significantly higher F0 in phrase-medial positions.

These results indicate that word-level prominence in disyllables in this language is not attracted by initial geminates but remains fixed on the final syllable. Therefore, the claim that Pattani Malay is a language with moraic onsets is not tenable.