We investigated whether expression of social meaning operationalized as individual gender identitity and politeness moderated pitch range in the two languages of female and male Japanese-English sequential bilinguals. The bilinguals were resident in either London (UK) or Tokyo (Japan) and read sentences to imagined addressees who varied in formality and sex. Results indicated significant differences in the pitch range of the two languages of the bilinguals, and this was confirmed for female and male bilinguals in London and Tokyo, with the language differences being more extreme in the London bilinguals than in the Tokyo bilinguals. Interestingly, self-attribution of masculine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the female bilinguals, whereas self-attribution of feminine gender traits patterned with within-language variation in the English pitch level of the male bilinguals. In addition, female and male bilinguals significantly varied their pitch range in Japanese, but not in English, as a function of the imagined addressees. Findings confirmed that bilinguals produce pitch range differently in their languages and suggest that expression of social meaning may affect pitch range of the two languages of female and male bilinguals differently.

Prosodic aspects of cross-linguistic contact are under-researched, especially past contact that has subsequently ceased. In this paper, we investigate declarative and polar question tunes of contemporary Cretan Greek, a regional variety of Greek whose speakers were in contact with Venetian speakers during the four and half centuries of Venetian rule on the island, from 1204 to 1669. The F0 contours of the Cretan tunes and alignment of peaks and troughs of interest with the nuclear vowel are compared to the corresponding tunes in Venetian dialect and Venetian Italian and to those in Athenian (Standard) Greek, which are used as control. The data (1610 declarative utterances and 698 polar questions) were drawn from natural speech corpora based on pragmatic criteria: broad focus for declaratives, broad focus, and information-seeking interpretation for polar questions. The pitch contour shapes of the tunes are modeled using polynomial basis functions, and the F0 alignment points are determined analytically. The results show the robustness of contact effects almost three and a half centuries after regular contact ceased and indicate that the shapes of the F0 contours of Cretan and Venetian declarative and polar question tunes are similar. In addition, Cretan alignment patterns are similar to Venetian and significantly different from Athenian. Insights are gained from research into how long prosodic characteristics may persist in a recipient language—decades or even centuries after the cessation of contact.

In Quebec French, /a ~ ɑ/ and /ε ~ aε/ are phonemic, whereas in Hexagonal French, these vowels are merged to /a/ and /ε/, respectively. We tested the effects of extended exposure to Quebec French (QF) as a second dialect (D2) on Hexagonal French (HF) speakers’ abilities to perceive these contrasts. Three groups of listeners were recruited: (1) non-mobile HF speakers born and living in France (HF group); (2) non-mobile QF speakers born and living in Quebec (QF group); and mobile HF speakers having moved from France to Quebec (HF>QF group). To determine any fine-grained effects of second dialect (D2) exposure on the perception of vowel contrasts, participants completed a same–different discrimination task in which they listened to stimuli paired at different levels of acoustic similarity. As expected, QF listeners showed a significant advantage over the HF group in discriminating between /a ~ ɑ/ and /ε ~ aε/ pairs, thus suggesting an own-dialect advantage in perceptual discrimination. Interestingly, this own-dialect advantage appeared to be greater for the /ε ~ aε/ contrast. The QF listeners also showed an advantage over the HF>QF group, and, surprisingly, this advantage was greater than over the HF group. In other words, the results suggested that the acquisition of a second dialect did not enhance the abilities of listeners to perceive differences between phonemic contrasts in that D2. If anything, the acquisition of the D2 disadvantaged the perceptual abilities of the HF>QF group. This might be because these phonemes have, over time, become less acoustically marked for the HF>QF participants and have, potentially, become integrated into their D1 phonemic categories.