Laura Colantoni
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 92489 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Laura Colantoni |
| NOMBRES | Laura |
| APELLIDO | Colantoni |
| FIRMA | COLANTONI L |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9731-0077 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 20 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 10 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 20 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Córdoba Spanish
In Spanish, the most consistent correlate of lexical stress appears to be duration. Even in phrasal contexts where the pitch contour is flat over all syllables in the word (as in parentheticals) and where pitch prominence is displaced to a different syllable (under rhetorical stress), lexically stressed syllables are usually durationally enhanced. Given this, the phenomenon known as “tonada cordobesa” is of particular interest, since it involves …
Articulatory Methods for the Study of Second Language Speech
In the introduction to this special issue on articulatory approaches to the study of L2 speech, we first highlight the interest and unique contributions of such methods to the investigation of speech production among second language speakers. This is followed by a brief overview of the four articulatory methods—electropalatography, nasometry, magnetic resonance imaging, and ultrasound—featured in the experimental studies presented in the seven ar…
Prosodic Disambiguation of Disjunctive Declaratives and Disjunctive Questions in Jordanian Arabic
This study investigates phonological and phonetic details of disjunctive declaratives (ddcls) and alternative questions (altqs) in Arabic. The aim of the phonological and phonetic analyses of these syntactically identical utterances is to find out the cues that are responsible for the disambiguation. Consequently, a production study eliciting ddcls and altqs was run with 20 participants producing 160 utterances (80 ddcls and 80 altqs). Findings r…
Stop-Lateral Clusters in French and Spanish
While both French and Spanish have complex onsets, the languages differ in the variety and distribution of clusters allowed as well as in the realization of voiced stops. The present study examines the effects of C1 voicing, place of articulation, and language on the production of word-initial /pl bl kl gl/ using a combination of electropalatographic (C1 and C2 linguopalatal contact and timing) and acoustic measures (duration and relative intensi…
The Phonetic and Morphosyntactic Dimensions of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Heritage Language Acquisition
Previous studies disagree as to whether heritage bilinguals demonstrate loss of knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender. As phonetic variability is known to affect the acquisition of certain grammatical markers, we examine whether bilinguals’ gender difficulties relate to bilingual contact-induced phonetic variability, namely, reduction in the inventory of word-final unstressed vowels. We analyzed narratives from children in the United States (n …
Articulatory Insights into the L2 Acquisition of English-/l/ Allophony
In many English varieties, /l/ is produced differently in onsets and codas. Compared with “light” syllable-initial realizations, “dark” syllable-final variants involve reduced tongue tip-alveolar ridge contact and a raised/retracted tongue dorsum. We investigate whether native French and Spanish speakers whose L1 lacks such positionally conditioned variation can acquire English-/l/ allophony, testing the hypotheses that (1) the allophonic pattern…
The Effects of Cross-Language Differences on Bilingual Production and/or Perception of Sentence-Level Intonation
We put together this Special Issue with the goal of collecting state-of-the art articles on the intonational patterns of different types of bilinguals, with a particular focus on understudied language pairings, and we believe that we have succeeded
Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals
We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference betwe…
Evidence-Based Design Principles for Spanish Pronunciation Teaching
In spite of the considerable body of pedagogical and experimental research providing clear insights into best practices for pronunciation instruction, there exists relatively little implementation of such practices in pedagogical materials including textbooks. This is particularly true for target languages other than English. With the goal of assisting instructors wishing to build effective evidence-based instructional practices, we outline a set…
Variable assimilation of English word-final /n
The phonetic realization of the English word-final alveolar nasal /n/ is known to be highly variable. Previous articulatory work has reported both gradient and categorical nasal place assimilation including considerable between-speaker differences. This work, however, has largely focused on a small subset of place contexts (namely, preceding velar /k, ɡ/) in a limited number of English varieties. The present article uses electropalatography to st…
Can prosody encode recursive embedding? Children's realizations of complex NPs in Japanese
Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children had acquired the lexical prosody (contrast between accented and unaccented words), a pre-requisite for…
The Role of Prosody and Morphology in the Mapping of Information Structure onto Syntax
The mapping of information structure onto morphology or intonation varies greatly crosslinguistically. Agglutinative languages, like Inuktitut or Quechua, have a rich morphological layer onto which discourse-level features are mapped but a limited use of intonation. Instead, English or Spanish lack grammaticalized morphemes that convey discourse-level information but use intonation to a relatively large extent. We propose that the difference foun…
The perception and interpretation of sentence types by L1 Spanish–L2 English speakers
While the L2 perception of segmentals has been investigated, our knowledge of the L2 perception of intonation is limited. Moreover, it is unclear how context affects L1 transfer. This study investigates the perception of English sentence types by adult L1 Spanish speakers across tasks varying in contextual information. In Task 1, participants heard low-pass filtered utterances and identified them as statements, questions or exclamations. Task 2 w…
A Phonetic Account of Spanish-English Bilinguals' Divergence with Agreement
Does bilingual language influence in the domain of phonetics impact the morphosyntactic domain? Spanish gender is encoded by word-final, unstressed vowels (/a e o/), which may diphthongize in word-boundary vowel sequences. English neutralizes unstressed final vowels and separates across-word vocalic sequences. The realization of gender vowels as schwa, due to cross-linguistic influence, may remain undetected if not directly analyzed. To explore t…
Gradient assimilation in French cross-word /n/+velar stop sequences
Articulatory studies have revealed cross-linguistic variation in the realization of cross-word nasal+stop sequences. Whereas languages such as Italian and Spanish show largely categorical regressive place assimilation (Kochetov & Colantoni 2011, Celata et al. 2013), English and German alveolar nasals are often characterized by gradient assimilation, modulated by the degree of overlap with the following gesture (Barry 1991, Ellis & Hardcastle 2002…
Gradient and Categorical Effects in Native and Non-native Nasal-rhotic Coordination
Languages are known to differ in their patterns of consonant-to-consonant coordination. Acquisition of a second language (L2) therefore involves learning these language-specific coordination patterns and the corresponding coarticulation and assimilation processes within and across words. This paper seeks to determine whether L2 learners of English acquire the target pattern of gradient assimilation of the nasal + rhotic sequence in English (e.g. …
The Mixed Effects of Phonetic Input Variability on Relative Ease of L2 Learning
We examined the consequences of within-category phonetic variability in the input on non-native learners’ production accuracy. Following previous empirical research on the L2 acquisition of phonetics and the lexicon, we tested the hypothesis that phonetic variability facilitates learning by analyzing English-speaking learners’ production of French and Spanish word-medial stop-rhotic clusters, which differ from their English counterparts in terms …
Synchronic evidence of a diachronic change
This article investigates the role that the phonetic parameters of duration and voicing play in shaping asymmetric patterns of Romance stop-liquid cluster realization. Based on acoustic analysis of experimental data from Quebec French and Argentine Spanish, we demonstrate the existence of an asymmetry in the proportional duration of the stop and a following epenthetic vowel or lateral: sonorants are shorter after voiceless stops in stop-liquid cl…
Coronal place contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish
Theoretical and descriptive work on Spanish phonetics and phonology has been largely based on Peninsular varieties. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to investigate articulatory characteristics of coronal consonant contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish. Simultaneous EPG and acoustic data were collected from five speakers from Buenos Aires (Argentina) and three speakers from Havana (Cuba) reading sentences with various syllable-initial …
Convergence and intonation
In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utte…
Coronal place contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish
Theoretical and descriptive work on Spanish phonetics and phonology has been largely based on Peninsular varieties. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to investigate articulatory characteristics of coronal consonant contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish. Simultaneous EPG and acoustic data were collected from five speakers from Buenos Aires (Argentina) and three speakers from Havana (Cuba) reading sentences with various syllable-initial …
The Role of Prosody and Morphology in the Mapping of Information Structure onto Syntax
The mapping of information structure onto morphology or intonation varies greatly crosslinguistically. Agglutinative languages, like Inuktitut or Quechua, have a rich morphological layer onto which discourse-level features are mapped but a limited use of intonation. Instead, English or Spanish lack grammaticalized morphemes that convey discourse-level information but use intonation to a relatively large extent. We propose that the difference foun…
A Phonetic Account of Spanish-English Bilinguals' Divergence with Agreement
Does bilingual language influence in the domain of phonetics impact the morphosyntactic domain? Spanish gender is encoded by word-final, unstressed vowels (/a e o/), which may diphthongize in word-boundary vowel sequences. English neutralizes unstressed final vowels and separates across-word vocalic sequences. The realization of gender vowels as schwa, due to cross-linguistic influence, may remain undetected if not directly analyzed. To explore t…
Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals
We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference betwe…
Gradient assimilation in French cross-word /n/+velar stop sequences
Articulatory studies have revealed cross-linguistic variation in the realization of cross-word nasal+stop sequences. Whereas languages such as Italian and Spanish show largely categorical regressive place assimilation (Kochetov & Colantoni 2011, Celata et al. 2013), English and German alveolar nasals are often characterized by gradient assimilation, modulated by the degree of overlap with the following gesture (Barry 1991, Ellis & Hardcastle 2002…
The Mixed Effects of Phonetic Input Variability on Relative Ease of L2 Learning
We examined the consequences of within-category phonetic variability in the input on non-native learners’ production accuracy. Following previous empirical research on the L2 acquisition of phonetics and the lexicon, we tested the hypothesis that phonetic variability facilitates learning by analyzing English-speaking learners’ production of French and Spanish word-medial stop-rhotic clusters, which differ from their English counterparts in terms …
Convergence and intonation
In this paper we present experimental evidence showing that Buenos Aires Spanish differs from other Spanish varieties in the realization of pre-nuclear pitch accents and in the final fall in broad focus declarative utterances. Whereas other Spanish varieties have been described consistently as showing late peak alignments, Buenos Aires Spanish displays early peak alignments. The alignment pattern found in Buenos Aires broad focus declarative utte…
Synchronic evidence of a diachronic change
This article investigates the role that the phonetic parameters of duration and voicing play in shaping asymmetric patterns of Romance stop-liquid cluster realization. Based on acoustic analysis of experimental data from Quebec French and Argentine Spanish, we demonstrate the existence of an asymmetry in the proportional duration of the stop and a following epenthetic vowel or lateral: sonorants are shorter after voiceless stops in stop-liquid cl…
Coronal place contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish
Theoretical and descriptive work on Spanish phonetics and phonology has been largely based on Peninsular varieties. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to investigate articulatory characteristics of coronal consonant contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish. Simultaneous EPG and acoustic data were collected from five speakers from Buenos Aires (Argentina) and three speakers from Havana (Cuba) reading sentences with various syllable-initial …
Gradient and Categorical Effects in Native and Non-native Nasal-rhotic Coordination
Languages are known to differ in their patterns of consonant-to-consonant coordination. Acquisition of a second language (L2) therefore involves learning these language-specific coordination patterns and the corresponding coarticulation and assimilation processes within and across words. This paper seeks to determine whether L2 learners of English acquire the target pattern of gradient assimilation of the nasal + rhotic sequence in English (e.g. …
The Mixed Effects of Phonetic Input Variability on Relative Ease of L2 Learning
We examined the consequences of within-category phonetic variability in the input on non-native learners’ production accuracy. Following previous empirical research on the L2 acquisition of phonetics and the lexicon, we tested the hypothesis that phonetic variability facilitates learning by analyzing English-speaking learners’ production of French and Spanish word-medial stop-rhotic clusters, which differ from their English counterparts in terms …
Gradient assimilation in French cross-word /n/+velar stop sequences
Articulatory studies have revealed cross-linguistic variation in the realization of cross-word nasal+stop sequences. Whereas languages such as Italian and Spanish show largely categorical regressive place assimilation (Kochetov & Colantoni 2011, Celata et al. 2013), English and German alveolar nasals are often characterized by gradient assimilation, modulated by the degree of overlap with the following gesture (Barry 1991, Ellis & Hardcastle 2002…
The perception and interpretation of sentence types by L1 Spanish–L2 English speakers
While the L2 perception of segmentals has been investigated, our knowledge of the L2 perception of intonation is limited. Moreover, it is unclear how context affects L1 transfer. This study investigates the perception of English sentence types by adult L1 Spanish speakers across tasks varying in contextual information. In Task 1, participants heard low-pass filtered utterances and identified them as statements, questions or exclamations. Task 2 w…
A Phonetic Account of Spanish-English Bilinguals' Divergence with Agreement
Does bilingual language influence in the domain of phonetics impact the morphosyntactic domain? Spanish gender is encoded by word-final, unstressed vowels (/a e o/), which may diphthongize in word-boundary vowel sequences. English neutralizes unstressed final vowels and separates across-word vocalic sequences. The realization of gender vowels as schwa, due to cross-linguistic influence, may remain undetected if not directly analyzed. To explore t…
Evidence-Based Design Principles for Spanish Pronunciation Teaching
In spite of the considerable body of pedagogical and experimental research providing clear insights into best practices for pronunciation instruction, there exists relatively little implementation of such practices in pedagogical materials including textbooks. This is particularly true for target languages other than English. With the goal of assisting instructors wishing to build effective evidence-based instructional practices, we outline a set…
Variable assimilation of English word-final /n
The phonetic realization of the English word-final alveolar nasal /n/ is known to be highly variable. Previous articulatory work has reported both gradient and categorical nasal place assimilation including considerable between-speaker differences. This work, however, has largely focused on a small subset of place contexts (namely, preceding velar /k, ɡ/) in a limited number of English varieties. The present article uses electropalatography to st…
Can prosody encode recursive embedding? Children's realizations of complex NPs in Japanese
Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children had acquired the lexical prosody (contrast between accented and unaccented words), a pre-requisite for…
The Role of Prosody and Morphology in the Mapping of Information Structure onto Syntax
The mapping of information structure onto morphology or intonation varies greatly crosslinguistically. Agglutinative languages, like Inuktitut or Quechua, have a rich morphological layer onto which discourse-level features are mapped but a limited use of intonation. Instead, English or Spanish lack grammaticalized morphemes that convey discourse-level information but use intonation to a relatively large extent. We propose that the difference foun…
Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals
We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference betwe…
The Phonetic and Morphosyntactic Dimensions of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Heritage Language Acquisition
Previous studies disagree as to whether heritage bilinguals demonstrate loss of knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender. As phonetic variability is known to affect the acquisition of certain grammatical markers, we examine whether bilinguals’ gender difficulties relate to bilingual contact-induced phonetic variability, namely, reduction in the inventory of word-final unstressed vowels. We analyzed narratives from children in the United States (n …
Articulatory Insights into the L2 Acquisition of English-/l/ Allophony
In many English varieties, /l/ is produced differently in onsets and codas. Compared with “light” syllable-initial realizations, “dark” syllable-final variants involve reduced tongue tip-alveolar ridge contact and a raised/retracted tongue dorsum. We investigate whether native French and Spanish speakers whose L1 lacks such positionally conditioned variation can acquire English-/l/ allophony, testing the hypotheses that (1) the allophonic pattern…
The Effects of Cross-Language Differences on Bilingual Production and/or Perception of Sentence-Level Intonation
We put together this Special Issue with the goal of collecting state-of-the art articles on the intonational patterns of different types of bilinguals, with a particular focus on understudied language pairings, and we believe that we have succeeded
Prosodic Disambiguation of Disjunctive Declaratives and Disjunctive Questions in Jordanian Arabic
This study investigates phonological and phonetic details of disjunctive declaratives (ddcls) and alternative questions (altqs) in Arabic. The aim of the phonological and phonetic analyses of these syntactically identical utterances is to find out the cues that are responsible for the disambiguation. Consequently, a production study eliciting ddcls and altqs was run with 20 participants producing 160 utterances (80 ddcls and 80 altqs). Findings r…
Stop-Lateral Clusters in French and Spanish
While both French and Spanish have complex onsets, the languages differ in the variety and distribution of clusters allowed as well as in the realization of voiced stops. The present study examines the effects of C1 voicing, place of articulation, and language on the production of word-initial /pl bl kl gl/ using a combination of electropalatographic (C1 and C2 linguopalatal contact and timing) and acoustic measures (duration and relative intensi…
Articulatory Methods for the Study of Second Language Speech
In the introduction to this special issue on articulatory approaches to the study of L2 speech, we first highlight the interest and unique contributions of such methods to the investigation of speech production among second language speakers. This is followed by a brief overview of the four articulatory methods—electropalatography, nasometry, magnetic resonance imaging, and ultrasound—featured in the experimental studies presented in the seven ar…
Acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Córdoba Spanish
In Spanish, the most consistent correlate of lexical stress appears to be duration. Even in phrasal contexts where the pitch contour is flat over all syllables in the word (as in parentheticals) and where pitch prominence is displaced to a different syllable (under rhetorical stress), lexically stressed syllables are usually durationally enhanced. Given this, the phenomenon known as “tonada cordobesa” is of particular interest, since it involves …
Linguistics (18 obras) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (18 obras) · Psychology (14 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (13 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · Philosophy (7 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (6 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (5 obras) · Mathematics (5 obras) · Philosophy (5 obras)