Production data have shown that one of the features distinguishing uptalk rises from question rises in New Zealand English (NZE) is the alignment point of the rise start, which is earlier in question utterances realized by younger speakers. Previous research has indicated that listeners are sensitive to this distinction in making a forced-choice decision as to whether an utterance is a statement or a question. NZE is also characterized by an ongoing merger of the NEAR and SQUARE diphthongs, w...

Knowledge of phonotactics is commonly assumed to derive from the lexicon. However, computational studies have suggested that phonotactic constraints might arise before the lexicon is in place, in particular from co-occurrences in continuous speech. The current study presents two artificial language learning experiments aimed at testing whether phonotactic learning can take place in the absence of words. Dutch participants were presented with novel consonant constraints embedded in continuous ...

A prominent pitch accent is known to trigger immediate contrastive interpretation of the accented referential expression. Previous experimental demonstrations of this effect, where [L+H* unaccented] contours led to an increase in earlier responses than [H* !H*] contours in contrastive context, may have benefited from the use of laboratory speech with stylized, homogenous pitch contours as well as data collected from a uniform participant group—college students. The present study tested visito...