The Prosody of Ambiguous Coordinate Structures in Hindi-English Bilinguals

dc.contributorSamuel, Mitchell
dc.contributorJohnson, Kyle
dc.contributor.advisorMara, Breen
dc.contributor.authorDas, Nayantara
dc.date.accessioned2022-07-01T18:04:55Z
dc.date.available2022-07-01T18:04:55Z
dc.date.gradyear2022en_US
dc.date.issued2022-07-01en
dc.descriptionThis thesis was written as part of a Special Major in Linguistics and Philosophy.en_US
dc.description.abstractAcross languages, speakers use different prosodic cues to signal information structure. Speakers of English, an intonation language, freely manipulate pitch accents and boundary tones to convey semantic and pragmatic content. Hindi, being a phrase language, is less variable – sentence melody arises primarily from phrasal tones, and is less sensitive to information structure. The differences between these two languages present a valuable opportunity to study people who speak them both. This study aims to investigate the differences in prosody between English and Hindi as spoken by bilinguals. Specifically, in a comparable speech production experiment, we looked at the differences in speakers’ prosodic realizations of sentences containing ambiguous coordination structures. These structures were distributed across four sets of names and six syntactic conditions. We focused our attention on the differences between pitch contours and duration values at syntactic boundaries both within and between English and Hindi. Since participants are bilingual, we also considered the role of language dominance and transfer, and their relationship to the reflection of the syntax-prosody mapping in these productions.en_US
dc.description.sponsorshipOther or Special Majoren_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10166/6373
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.rights.restrictedrestricteden_US
dc.subjectProsodyen_US
dc.subjectBilingualismen_US
dc.subjectSyntax-Prosodyen_US
dc.titleThe Prosody of Ambiguous Coordinate Structures in Hindi-English Bilingualsen_US
dc.typeThesis
mhc.degreeUndergraduateen_US
mhc.institutionMount Holyoke College

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