Inflectional Change Research Articles

Characterizing the morphosyntactic processing deficit and its relationship to phonology in developmental dyslexia

This study explores the morphosyntactic processing deficit in developmental dyslexia, addressing the on-going debate on the linguistic nature of the disorder, and directly testing the hypothesis that the deficit is based on underlying processing difficulties, such as acoustic and/or phonological impairments. Short German sentences consisting of a pronoun and a verb, either correct or containing a morphosyntactic violation, were auditorily presented to 17 German-speaking adults with dyslexia, and 17 matched control participants, while an EEG was recorded. In order to investigate the interaction between low-level phonological processing and morphosyntactic processing, the verbal inflections were manipulated to consist of different levels of acoustic salience. The event-related potential (ERP) results confirm altered morphosyntactic processing in participants with dyslexia, especially when morphosyntactic violations are expressed by both lexical and inflectional changes. Moreover, ERP data on phoneme discrimination and behavioural data on phonemic awareness and verbal short-term memory reveal phonological deficits in dyslexic participants. However, a causal relationship between phonological and morphosyntactic processing was not conclusive, because anomalous morphosyntactic processing in dyslexia is not directly mediated by acoustic salience, rather it correlates with high-level phonological skills and is mediated by lexical cues.

Inflectional change, ‘sound laws’ and the autonomy of morphology

Traditional views of inflectional changes often run as follows: A morphological opposition expressed by affixes is disturbed by sound changes. It is then left to morphology to ‘clean up the mess’; morphology is merely reactive. If, however, morphology can operate “by itself” (Aronoff 1994, Carstairs-McCarthy 1994, 2001, 2010, Maiden 2004, 2005), one would not expect this classical scenario to be the entire truth. The present paper pursues the hypothesis that there are morphological changes that are not merely reactive, but rather have a morphological motivation. This hypothesis is argued on the basis of well-known reduction processes in Scandinavian case and gender. Both are traditionally taken to represent the classical scenario, but in both, morphology ultimately plays a more prominent role. I argue that neither phonological erosion nor language contact can totally explain Scandinavian case loss and gender reduction. This supports an autonomous role for morphology. Resume On interprete souvent les changements flexionnels comme suit: une opposition morphologique exprimee a l’aide d’affixes se voit modifiee en raison de changements phonetiques. La morphologie, etant par nature purement reactive, doit alors “remettre de l’ordre” dans le systeme. Si, par contre, la morphologie peut agir “seule” (Aronoff 1994, Carstairs-McCarthy 1994, 2001, 2010, Maiden 2004, 2005), il n’est pas interdit de penser que ce scenario classique ne recele pas toute la verite. L’hypothese du present article est qu’il existe des changements morphologiques qui ne sont pas purement reactifs, mais qui sont motives plutot par la morphologie. Cette hypothese se fonde sur les processus bien connus de reduction de cas et de genres dans les langues scandinaves. Dans les deux cas, l’interpretation traditionnelle est qu’il s’agit du scenario classique, alors qu’en fait, la morphologie joue un role plus net. A mon avis, ni l’erosion phonologique ni le contact langagier ne suffisent pour expliquer la perte de cas et la reduction de genres dans les langues scandinaves, ce qui corroborerait l’hypothese du role autonome de la morphologie. Zusammenfassung Traditionellen Auffassungen gemas andert sich die Flexionsmorphologie oft wie folgt: Zuerst fallen Affixe phonologischen Anderungen zum Opfer. Diese Anderungen sind an sich nicht morphologisch, sondern phonologisch motiviert, andern aber die Ausdrucksseite der morphologischen Opposition. Danach muss die Morphologie ‚aufraumen‘. Sie ist also nur ‚reaktiv‘. Wenn aber die Morphologie selbstandig arbeiten kann (‘by itself ’, vgl. z.B. Aronoff 1994, Carstairs-McCarthy 2010, Maiden 2005), ware zu erwarten, dass die traditionelle Auffassung nicht in allen Fallen zutrifft. Im vorliegenden Artikel wird die These vertreten, dass es Entwicklungen gibt, die von der Morphologie selbst ausgelost werden. Diese These wird anhand der bekannten Reduktionsprozesse in der skandinavischen Genus- und Kasusmorphologie verteidigt. Diese Prozesse werden oft als Beispiele fur die traditionelle Auffassung herangezogen. Meines Erachtens kann Kasus- und Genusverlust aber weder durch phonologische ‚Erosion‘ noch durch Sprachkontakt ganz erklart werden. Deswegen muss fur die Morphologie eine autonome Rolle angenommen werden.

Greek dialectal evidence for the role of the paradigm in inflectional change

Several dialectal variants of the inflectional ending for person, number, tense, and voice in the Modern Greek past imperfective nonactive paradigm are presented here by way of showing the relevance of dialect material for linguistic theory. In this case, the endings underwent reshapings based on other related endings (e.g., 3PL based on 1/2PL), providing a basis for understanding the nature of interactions among different “cells” within a paradigm and the constructs that can be employed to model them. As a result, both rules of referral and O–O correspondence relations are shown to have to take sub-word similarities into consideration, and various constraints on such interactions are considered and rejected in favor of a liberal view that allows for any cell to relate to any other cell. Finally, a distinction is motivated, based on cell-to-cell influences, between adventitious and significant syncretism of form.

Elicited production of case-marking in Russian and Serbian children: Are diminutive nouns easier to inflect?

Two experiments used an elicited speech-production paradigm to explore children's acquisition of noun case-marking inflections. Russian ( N = 24, 2;10— 4;6 years) and Serbian children ( N = 24, 2;10—4;11) were asked to produce prepositional phrases requiring genitive or dative inflections of masculine and feminine, familiar and novel, simplex ( vaza [Ru/Se: vase]) and diminutive (Ru: vazochka, Se: vazica) nouns. Across languages, children produced fewer case-marking errors with familiar compared to novel nouns, and diminutive compared to simplex nouns. The diminutive advantage occurred despite a markedly lower frequency of diminutive usage in Serbian than Russian child-directed speech. This suggests that in acquiring richly inflected languages, children most readily construct low-level generalizations of inflectional changes applying to morpho-phonologically homogeneous clusters of words like diminutives.

Topside measurements at Jicamarca during solar minimum

Abstract. Long-pulse topside radar data acquired at Jicamarca and processed using full-profile analysis are compared to data processed using more conventional, range-gated approaches and with analytic and computational models. The salient features of the topside observations include a dramatic increase in the Te/Ti temperature ratio above the F peak at dawn and a local minimum in the topside plasma temperature in the afternoon. The hydrogen ion fraction was found to exhibit hyperbolic tangent-shaped profiles that become shallow (gradually changing) above the O+-H+ transition height during the day. The profile shapes are generally consistent with diffusive equilibrium, although shallowing to the point of changes in inflection can only be accounted for by taking the effects of E×B drifts and meridional winds into account. The SAMI2 model demonstrates this as well as the substantial effect that drifts and winds can have on topside temperatures. Significant quiet-time variability in the topside composition and temperatures may be due to variability in the mechanical forcing. Correlations between topside measurements and magnetometer data at Jicamarca support this hypothesis.

Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language

Human language is based on grammatical rules. Cultural evolution allows these rules to change over time. Rules compete with each other: as new rules rise to prominence, old ones die away. To quantify the dynamics of language evolution, we studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Although an elaborate system of productive conjugations existed in English's proto-Germanic ancestor, Modern English uses the dental suffix, '-ed', to signify past tense. Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs. We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs. Of these irregular verbs, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. We study how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast. Our study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule.

A Study of the Inflectional Change and the Passive Construction in English

A Study of the Inflectional Change and the Passive Construction in English

Handbook of Diagnostic and Structured Interviewing

Article AbstractFrom our regular book review column. With the advent of DSM-III-R, psychiatry committed itself to a quantitative and operational system. Although a dramatic increase in reliability was achieved, clinical diagnosis was, and is, still completely dependent on how the history of illness was obtained. Slight changes in inflection, in choice of language, and in sequence of questioning, coupled with clinicians†idiosyncratic choices as to what questions should be asked and determination of what answers are clinically relevant, result in unnecessary diagnostic variability. Structured interviews were designed to remedy this problem by organizing clinician inquiry and by limiting, as much as possible, sources of needless variance. As the author of this work notes, however, mindless adherence to structured interviews, at the cost of rapport and abandonment of clinical intuition, can result in a cure that is worse than the problem itself.

Videor Ergo Sum

Videor Ergo Sum

On the hierarchy of naturalness principles in inflectional morphology

1. This article proposes a criticism and elaboration of the theory of Natural Morphology as it relates to inflection and to inflectional change. The theoretical framework I start from is that set out at length in Mayerthaler (1981/1988), Wurzel (1984/1989), Dressler (1987) and Kilani-Schoch (1988). The concept of naturalness involved here combines Prague School notions of markedness (see Andersen, 1989) with more recent typological approaches and a semiotic framework which derives from the work of C. S. Peirce. The goal of naturalness theories in historical linguistics is to identify some constraints on language change (for example, on sound change, analogy and grammaticalization) which are, broadly speaking, functionally motivated, that is, motivated by the nature of human psychology or of human communication. Naturalness theories offer an approach to explanation of Weinreich, Labov & Herzog's (1968; 102, 186) actuation problem. Among other things, Natural Morphology proposes explanatory principles and constraints for analogy.

Natural Language Retrieval in Nuclear Safety Information System

A natural language retrieval program NATLANG is developed to assist in the retrieval of information from event-and-cause descriptions in Licensee Event Reports (LER). The characteristics of NATLANG are (1) the use of base forms of words to retrieve related forms altered by the addition of prefixes or suffixes or changes in inflection, (2) direct access and short time retrieval with an alphabet pointer, (3) effective determination of the items and entries for a Hitachi event classification in a two step retrieval scheme, and (4) Japanese character output with the PL-1 language. NATLANG output reduces the effort needed to re-classify licensee events in the Hitachi event classification.

Natural language retrieval in nuclear safety information system.

A natural language retrieval program NATLANG is developed to assist in the retrieval of information from event-and-cause descriptions in Licensee Event Reports (LER). The characteristics of NATLANG are (1) the use of base forms of words to retrieve related forms altered by the addition of prefixes or suffixes or changes in inflection, (2) direct access and short time retrieval with an alphabet pointer, (3) effective determination of the items and entries for a Hitachi event classification in a two step retrieval scheme, and (4) Japanese character output with the PL-1 language. NATLANG output reduces the effort needed to re-classify licensee events in the Hitachi event classification.

Frequency variability in the aged voice.

Fundamental frequency variations were examined in readings of the fourth and fifth sentences of the "Rainbow Passage" and in the sustained vowel /a/ produced by 20 young adults and 20 older adults. The Tektronix Visipitch provided the fundamental frequency contour (frequency variations in continuous reading) and Honeywell Visicorder determined frequency perturbation in the sustained vowel. Results showed that older speakers produced lower pitches, larger intonational ranges, and greater numbers of inflections in reading than did younger speakers. The maximum change in inflection produced by older adults was significantly greater than that of young adults. In addition, frequency perturbation found in the sustained vowel production of older speakers was significantly greater than that of younger speakers. Information concerning the perceived pitch characteristics of the voices was also obtained. Implications of these findings for the effects of aging on voice as well as diagnosis of laryngeal dysfunction were discussed.

What Else Happens to Opaque Rules?

In discussing rule opacity as a factor influencing phonological change, Kiparsky 1971 mentions three common fates of opaque rules within the phonological system: loss; re-ordering with respect to other rules to yield greater transparency; and morphologization. In this paper I discuss another sort of systematic reaction to the presence of an opaque rule, a reaction that has so far been overlooked in the discussion of rule opacity: the elimination of opacity-inducing environments in inflectional paradigms through analogic affix replacements. I argue that effects of this sort will continue to be overlooked until we recognize, and deal explicitly with, nonphonological aspects of inflectional change.*

On the analysis of inflectional change*

On the analysis of inflectional change*

Form and Function: A Quandary

The agonizing process of evolving a more accurate grammar for presentation in the classroom goes on. Dr. Conlin, a professor of English education at the Arizona State University, Tempe, succinctly examines the problem of form and function in structural grammar, pointing out that “in a modem analytic language we are still plagued with inflectional changes which at times point in the wrong direction. Since function determines meaning and therefore response, identification of function is of primary concern.”