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1. North Germanic Tonal Accent is Equipollent and Metrical: Evidence from Compounding

   https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v9i0.4913  

   Kaldhol, Nina Hagen; Köhnlein, Björn (May 2021, Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology)

   null (Ed.)

   For the North Germanic opposition between two tonal accents, it has been claimed that Accent 2 has a lexical tone, that Accent 1 has a lexical tone, that both accents are marked tonally in the lexicon, or that the accent opposition is based on two types of feet. Based on evidence from compounding, we argue that the opposition between Accent 1 and Accent 2 is equipollent, and that this is best expressed in a foot-based approach since each lexical item will necessarily receive a foot. Elaborating on previous metrical work on tonal accent, we assume that binary feet can be built on moras (= Accent 1) or syllables (= Accent 2) and show how this successfully captures compound accentuation in Central Swedish and Urban East Norwegian. Our foot-based analysis is in line with recent work on tonal accent that calls into question the claim that all tonal contrasts within syllables must be due to the presence of lexical tone. In addition, our analysis addresses issues surrounding the phonology of compounds in general, and prosodic effects of compounding in particular. 

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2. What word-prosodic typology is missing: Motivating foot structure as an analytical tool for syllable-internal prosodic oppositions

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-024-09639-z  

   Köhnlein, Björn; Cameron, Ian S (June 2024, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory)

   A notoriously contested subarea of phonological typology is word-prosodic typology, which governs suprasegmental structure (such as tone, syllable structure and stress) at the word level. Within word-prosodic typology, it is widely recognized that some languages have so-called stress systems while others have lexical-tone systems. Other languages appear to have intermediate systems, with properties of both stress and lexically contrastive tone. Certain types of such intermediate systems are at the core of ongoing theoretical debates on the nature of word- prosodic systems, viz. language varieties with contrasts between two word tones that are restricted to the main-stressed syllables of a word, a phenomenon that is often descriptively referred to as tonal accent. In this paper, we aim to show that exploring tone-accent systems in detail has the potential to significantly contribute to word-prosodic typology, specifically concerning the foot as a tool for the analysis of syllable-internal prosodic contrasts. The phonology of tonal accent in Franconian (a variety of West Germanic spoken in parts of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) will be the main piece of evidence supporting our claims, with a focus on predictable interactions between segmental structure and accentuation. A central implication of our analysis is that tonal contrasts within syllables can sometimes derive from two types of feet being active in the same prosodic system. We support the Franconian evidence with analogous tone-segment interactions in Estonian and discuss the relevance of our claims in the broader context of word-prosodic typology. 

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3. It’s all a matter of timing: How some Dutch and German varieties developed tonal contrasts

   https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2025.a962897  

   Köhnlein, Björn; Cameron, Ian S; Coppola, Oscar (June 2025, Language)

   Certain varieties in the Dutch and German language area distinguish two groups of words on the basis of different tonal melodies, a phenomenon called (Franconian) tonal accent. Despite extensive efforts, scholars are still far from reaching consensus on how this contrast may have developed. We show how both the accent genesis and distributional variation across dialects can be modeled by assuming that intrinsic durational differences between two sets of vowels formed the basis of the opposition. A key insight emerging from our scenario is that vowel-lengthening processes in open syllables must have been ongoing when apocope was completed, counter to the received view in Germanic historical phonology. Our analysis also addresses various broader issues concerning mechanisms of prosodic change, the interaction of sound changes, and the reliability of manuscript evidence. 

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4. A protracted developmental trajectory for English-learning children’s detection of consonant mispronunciations in newly learned words

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2069026  

   Quam, Carolyn; Swingley, Daniel (September 2022, Language Acquisition)

   Children are adept at learning their language’s speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned word. First, to provide a baseline of mature native-speaker performance, adults were taught a new word under training conditions of low prosodic variability. In a second experiment, 24- and 30-month-olds were taught a new word under training conditions of high or low prosodic variability. Children and adults showed evidence of learning the taught word. Adults’ target looking was reduced when the novel word was realized at test with a change in the voicing of the initial consonant, but children did not show any such decrement in target fixation. For both children and adults, most learners did not treat the pho- nologically distinct variant as a different word. Acoustic-phonetic variability during teaching did not have consistent effects. Thus, under conditions of intensive short-term training, 24- and 30-month-olds did not differentiate a newly learned word from a variant differing only in consonant voicing. High task complexity during training could explain why mispronunciation detec- tion was weaker here than in some prior studies. 

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5. Mora stress in Shina as Contrastive Foot Structure

   Köhnlein, Björn (February 2022, Proceedings of (F)ASAL-10)

   Guha, Ishani; Kidwai, Sana; Schwarz, Martha (Ed.)

   I argue that so-called ‘mora stress’ in Kohistani Shina (spoken in Northern Pakistan, realized as falling vs. rising accent) is best analyzed as a difference in the alignment of a LH* pitch accent to two types of feet (moraic vs. syllabic trochees). This paper offers a formalization of the mapping of (intonational) tones to foot structure and argues that independent evidence for a foot-based approach comes from a process of stress advancement, where stem stress predictably shifts to a following suffix when the final mora of the stem is accented; yet it remains on the stem when the stem accent is on a non-final mora. I end by briefly discussing typological and theoretical implications of our analysis, also drawing on a comparison with a similar advancement pattern in Lithuanian (known as de Saussure’s Law). 

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