In a discrimination experiment on Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts (i.e., duration contrasts), we find that French listeners are more sensitive to silent closure duration in word-final /t/ than to voiced murmur, or even, frication duration in initial position. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near-ceiling on all these contrasts. We propose that native listeners of French, in w...

OBJECTIVE To describe a systematic quantitative approach to assessing the predictions made by competing theories using contrasts and correlational indices of effect sizes. METHODS We illustrate the use of the contrast F and t to compare and combine predictions when the raw data are continuous scores, and z contrasts when working with frequencies in 2 x k tables of counts. RESULTS The tradit...

Editorial – Cohabitation, marriage and separation: contrasts in Europe • Premarital cohabitation: more common in the north than in the south p. 2 • Cohabitation leads less often to marriage p. 2 • Fewer men and women are marryingp. 2 • Unions are more short-lived p. 3 • Several unions in a lifetime: a general trend? p. 4 • Box: Study population p. 4 C O N TE N TS are not marrying at all. Unions...

Successful dialogue requires cultivation of common ground (Clark, 1996), shared information, which changes as the conversation proceeds. Dialogue partners can maintain common ground by using different modalities like eye gaze, facial expressions, gesture, content information or intonation. Here, we focus on intonation and investigate how contrast in information structure is prosodically marked ...

This work surveys the depth and character of ozone depletion in the Antarctic and Arctic using available long balloon-borne and ground-based records that cover multiple decades from ground-based sites. Such data reveal changes in the range of ozone values including the extremes observed as polar air passes over the stations. Antarctic ozone observations reveal widespread and massive local deple...

A strong intuition that phonemic qualities suggest meaning has motivated discussions of the sound of language since the time of Plato. However, studies of phonetic symbolism this century have been inconclusive: while systematic contrasts of meaning have often been found, these are not necessarily due to innate phonetic meanings. An alternative approach is presented based on a theory of phonemic...

In a discrimination experiment on several Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts, we find that French listeners encounter substantial difficulty compared to native speakers. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near ceiling level on all contrasts. French listeners perform better on final contrasts such as fit-fitt than initial contrasts such as bi-bbi or sir-ssir. That is, French listen...

This study investigates the independent phonological status of tonal and quantity contrasts in Bosnian Serbian, a Southern Slavic pitch accent language. Accents in Bosnian Serbian are characterised by falling vs. rising contours and long and short quantity, leading to four different accent types. Previous research suggests that pure tonal contrasts are hard to be distinguished on acoustic and p...