Language-specific Constraints Research Articles

Greek derivational structures: restrictions and constraints

This paper investigates the general principles governing the combination of a base with a particular suffix. Elaborating on the well-known conflict between base-driven and affix-driven selectional restrictions, we argue in favor of affix-driven selection. We claim that the various selectional restrictions imposed by the suffixes are inherent specifications, which characterize their entries at the lexical level; if suffixes are heads of derivational structures, these restrictions pass from heads to the derived items through percolation. Additionally, we propose that, beside selectional restrictions, the combinatorial behaviour of suffixes may be determined by a number of other lexically-specified properties such as the ‘unique suffix’ or ‘closing suffix’. Finally, we claim that derivational structures are also governed by language-independent or language-specific constraints, operating on input structures.

Modeling the contribution of phonotactic cues to the problem of word segmentation

How do infants find the words in the speech stream? Computational models help us understand this feat by revealing the advantages and disadvantages of different strategies that infants might use. Here, we outline a computational model of word segmentation that aims both to incorporate cues proposed by language acquisition researchers and to establish the contributions different cues can make to word segmentation. We present experimental results from modified versions of Venkataraman's (2001) segmentation model that examine the utility of: (1) language-universal phonotactic cues; (2) language-specific phonotactic cues which must be learned while segmenting utterances; and (3) their combination. We show that the language-specific cue improves segmentation performance overall, but the language-universal phonotactic cue does not, and that their combination results in the most improvement. Not only does this suggest that language-specific constraints can be learned simultaneously with speech segmentation, but it is also consistent with experimental research that shows that there are multiple phonotactic cues helpful to segmentation (e.g. Mattys, Jusczyk, Luce & Morgan, 1999; Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001). This result also compares favorably to other segmentation models (e.g. Brent, 1999; Fleck, 2008; Goldwater, 2007; Johnson & Goldwater, 2009; Venkataraman, 2001) and has implications for how infants learn to segment.

Universal and language-specific constraints on phonemic awareness: evidence from Russian–Hebrew bilingual children

The study tested phonemic awareness in the two languages of Russian (L1)–Hebrew (L2) sequential bilingual children (N = 20) using phoneme deletion tasks where the phoneme to be deleted occurred word initial, word final, as a singleton, or part of a cluster, in long and short words and stressed and unstressed syllables. The experiments were designed to test the effect of four linguistic factors on children’s phoneme deletion: phoneme position (initial, final), linguistic context (singleton, cluster), word length and stress. The results indicated that word length and stress confirmed previous findings in other languages demonstrating the universal validity of these factors. However, phoneme position and linguistic context gave rise to novel findings in the languages studied and provided evidence for language-specific effects on phonemic awareness reflecting onset-rime versus body-coda syllable structure differences. The results are discussed within the framework of universal versus language-specific constraints on phonemic awareness performance in different languages.

Word-elicited MMN is sensitive to gap insertion

Event Abstract Back to Event Word-elicited MMN is sensitive to gap insertion Alessandro Tavano1*, Sabine Grimm2, J. Costa-Faidella2, L. Slabu2 and C. Escera2 1 Department of Child Neuropsychiatry and Neurorehabilitation, “Eugenio Medea” Scientific Institute, Italy 2 Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Spain The phenomenon of lexical Representational Negativity (RN) refers to MMN to words being higher in amplitude than MMN to pseudowords. The nature of such enhancement is currently under investigation. To advance the discussion, in Experiment 1 we replicated the finding of lexical RN with bisyllabic words and pseudowords in fourteen Spanish native speakers, using an orthogonal oddball paradigm to match the physical features of a word deviant in the context of a pseudoword standard with respect to a pseudoword deviant in the context of a word standard. Results confirm the detection of a lexical RN for Spanish in the time window 160-180 ms after deviant onset, with the MMN to a word deviant being more frontally distributed than MMN to a non-word deviant. In experiments 2 and 3, we probed the nature of lexical RN by testing its sensitivity to the insertion of an intersyllabic silent gap in two gap duration conditions: 20 ms and 120 ms. We hypothesized that the lexical RN would resist the silent 20 ms gap if it was reflecting higher-order, lexical-conceptual processes, but not the 120 ms gap condition which perceptually violates language-specific constraints. Results confirm that with a 120 ms gap no significant difference in amplitude between MMNs to words and pseudowords is evident, and they present with a similar more central distribution. Further, a 20 ms silent gap seems to be sufficient to cancel out the lexical RN effect, suggesting that it might reflect a first stage of trace matching in long-term memory driven by phonological and prosodic rather than lexical-conceptual information. Conference: MMN 09 Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster Presentations Citation: Tavano A, Grimm S, Costa-Faidella J, Slabu L and Escera C (2009). Word-elicited MMN is sensitive to gap insertion. Conference Abstract: MMN 09 Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.104 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 26 Mar 2009; Published Online: 26 Mar 2009. * Correspondence: Alessandro Tavano, Department of Child Neuropsychiatry and Neurorehabilitation, “Eugenio Medea” Scientific Institute, Bosisio Parini, Italy, alessandro.tavano@bp.lnf.it Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Alessandro Tavano Sabine Grimm J. Costa-Faidella L. Slabu C. Escera Google Alessandro Tavano Sabine Grimm J. Costa-Faidella L. Slabu C. Escera Google Scholar Alessandro Tavano Sabine Grimm J. Costa-Faidella L. Slabu C. Escera PubMed Alessandro Tavano Sabine Grimm J. Costa-Faidella L. Slabu C. Escera Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

From language-specific constraints to implicational universals

This article seeks to shed more light on the well-studied, yet still challenging, dative alternation. It starts from the cognitive-typological suggestion of Croft (2001, 2003) that language-internal variation is subject to the same constraints as cross-linguistic variation (the semantic map model), and that careful language-specific research may therefore reveal facts about language in general. I argue that there is a parallel between dativisability and passivisability. Then, using a sample of active tokens from the British National Corpus of ditransitive give in both the indirect-object and double-object constructions and comparing these to a matched sample of passive examples, I evaluate the effect on passivisability — and hence dativisability — of the semantic parameters proposed in previous scholarship. The results are stated as a set of implicational universals. They should hold for all languages that feature the alternation, and make diachronic predictions as well. In addition to the semantics — which has been discussed in many previous studies — I argue that token frequency also plays a role in promoting dativisability — which has never been suggested before. The conclusion identifies some general implications for theoretical linguistics and for the practice of research on language structure and meaning.

Word-minimality, Epenthesis and Coda Licensing in the Early Acquisition of English

Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda consonants cannot be produced. This paper evaluates this proposal by examining the development of word-final coda consonants in the spontaneous speech of four English-speaking children between the ages of one and two. Although there was no evidence of vowel lengthening, coda consonants were more accurately produced in monosyllabic target words with monomoriac vowels, suggesting earlier use of coda consonants in contexts where they can be prosodified as part of a bimoraic foot. One child also showed extensive use of vowel epenthesis and coda consonant aspiration concurrent with the production of codas. However, we show that this was due to the articulatory challenges of producing complex syllable structures rather than an attempt to produce well-formed minimal words. These results suggest that learners of English may exhibit an early awareness of moraic structure at the level of the syllable, but that language-specific constraints regarding word-minimality may be acquired later than originally thought.

The Malagasy Subject/Topic as an A′-Element

As in other Philippine-type languages, clauses in Malagasy contain a structurally and referentially prominent DP constituent, the trigger, whose grammatical function is indicated by voice morphology on the verb. The trigger shares functional properties with both subjects and topics in other languages. In the Principles and Parameters literature, most researchers identify the trigger as a structural subject, located in the position where nominative case is checked. In this paper, I present evidence that the trigger occupies an A′-position comparable to that of topics in verb-second languages such as Icelandic. I also consider some of the consequences of this analysis– I suggest that voice morphology in Malagasy, rather than marking relation-changing operations like passive, (indirectly) encodes the abstract case features of the A′-chain linked to the trigger, making it akin to wh-agreement in Chamorro. In addition, I argue for a non-traditional treatment of the well-known A′-extraction restrictions in Malagasy, usually captured by means of a language-specific constraint prohibiting extraction of non-subjects. Treating the trigger as a topic rather than a subject, I propose that wh-movement competes with topicalization for the same A′-position (as in verb-second languages), rendering the two operations mutually exclusive within a clause.

Prosodic influences on consonant production in Dutch: Effects of prosodic boundaries, phrasal accent and lexical stress

Prosodic influences on phonetic realizations of four Dutch consonants (/t d s z/) were examined. Sentences were constructed containing these consonants in word-initial position; the factors lexical stress, phrasal accent and prosodic boundary were manipulated between sentences. Eleven Dutch speakers read these sentences aloud. The patterns found in acoustic measurements of these utterances (e.g., voice onset time (VOT), consonant duration, voicing during closure, spectral center of gravity, burst energy) indicate that the low-level phonetic implementation of all four consonants is modulated by prosodic structure. Boundary effects on domain-initial segments were observed in stressed and unstressed syllables, extending previous findings which have been on stressed syllables alone. Three aspects of the data are highlighted. First, shorter VOTs were found for /t/ in prosodically stronger locations (stressed, accented and domain-initial), as opposed to longer VOTs in these positions in English. This suggests that prosodically driven phonetic realization is bounded by language-specific constraints on how phonetic features are specified with phonetic content: Shortened VOT in Dutch reflects enhancement of the phonetic feature {−spread glottis}, while lengthened VOT in English reflects enhancement of {+spread glottis}. Prosodic strengthening therefore appears to operate primarily at the phonetic level, such that prosodically driven enhancement of phonological contrast is determined by phonetic implementation of these (language-specific) phonetic features. Second, an accent effect was observed in stressed and unstressed syllables, and was independent of prosodic boundary size. The domain of accentuation in Dutch is thus larger than the foot. Third, within a prosodic category consisting of those utterances with a boundary tone but no pause, tokens with syntactically defined Phonological Phrase boundaries could be differentiated from the other tokens. This syntactic influence on prosodic phrasing implies the existence of an intermediate-level phrase in the prosodic hierarchy of Dutch.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (review)

Reviewed by: The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature by Steven Pinker Frank Keil The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. By Steven Pinker. New York: Viking Press, 2002. Pp. 509. ISBN 0670031518. $27.95. Humans come to behave and think in different ways from other species despite what might seem to be similar environmental experiences. The best example is language. Even the most dedicated and deranged pet owners who talk continuously to their pets fail miserably in getting their dog or cat to speak while even the most careless and neglectful parent almost always has a child who speaks normally. Children bring something to the language-learning environment that no other animal has. They seem to bring a set of language-specific constraints that creates a universal grammar and which greatly facilitates the language acquisition process. In his early writings Steven Pinker certainly embraces this point of view as well. He and Paul Bloom have [End Page 859] also advanced the additional argument that natural language should be seen as an adaptation selected for in the course of evolution. P then took his nativist and evolutionary perspective for language and extended it to perception, cognition, and emotion (Pinker 1997). In The blank slate he further argues that most folks, both within and outside of the academy, don’t get it and feel oddly beholden to the view of humans as having no intrinsic natures, containing nothing in their initial cognitive makeup that guides development or constrains the adult form. He sees this misconception as further reinforced by a mistaken dualism, ‘the ghost in the machine’, that allows the mind to escape any biological limits and by romantic and unrealistic notions of humans as ‘noble savages’ corrupted by the evils of society. Most centrally, however, P argues that views of humans having rich intrinsic natures are morally, socially, and politically acceptable. The blank slate is an attempt to convince the reader that it really is OK to be a nativist and an evolutionary psychologist without being a racist, supporting eugenics, or making a political statement. It is unfortunate that this extremely important central message may get lost by those who become sidetracked with concerns about the status of evolutionary psychology. At the abstract level the evolutionary psychology view seems eminently reasonable. There is no magic line that says that organs and systems outside of the brain could evolve in ways that allow organisms to adapt to their niches, while those inside the brain could not. There is also no magic line that says that as one moves inward from the sensory transducers to ‘higher’ levels of processing there is a point at which structures and systems could not be adaptations. No one doubts that the eye evolved for picking up and processing light and indeed different organisms have quite different visual systems tailored for their niches, in some cases changing in their properties as they change their niches in development (e.g. Loew & Sillman 1993). The same is true for the ear, the nose, the tongue, and the skin. Moreover, the structures that first process the information coming in from those transducers are similarly clearly adaptations for the information they receive. It seems bizarre and arbitrary to assume that all adaptations would cease as that information is processed at higher and higher levels. What is not at all obvious, however, is the detailed nature of the adaptations that govern our cognitive and emotional lives. Indeed, even for language, there is much more controversy around whether any of the universal structural properties of languages could have been predicted from even the most exhaustive analyses of the niches inhabited by pre- and postlinguistic hominids. Unlike thorns which clearly serve the function of protecting plants, or wings which aid flight, it is much more difficult to say how our human set of constraints on subjacency relations are more adaptive than another variant that could have been built in instead. Indeed, even by some evolutionary accounts, such constraints may not have been differentially adaptive. Instead, they may be more like social conventions such as driving on a particular side of the road. Something had to be done to solve the...

Possessors and (in)definiteness

In this paper I focus on the relation between the definiteness status of a DP and the definiteness status of its subparts across languages. I show that contrary to what has been assumed in e.g., Longobardi (1996) possessive constructions across languages do not show a uniform behaviour with respect to (in)definiteness spread and thus, it is questionable whether a unified treatment of possessive patterns is desirable. Rather possessive constructions are subject to several, language specific constraints. This leads to a fine-grained picture of expressions of possession.

English syllabification as the interaction of markedness constraints

The present study offers an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of the syllabification of intervocalic consonants and glides in Modern English. It will be argued that the proposed syllabifications fall out from universal markedness constraints – all of which derive motivation from other languages – and a language-specific ranking. The analysis offered below is therefore an alternative to the traditional rule-based analyses of English syllabification, e.g. Kahn (1976), Borowsky (1986), Giegerich (1992, 1999) and to the Optimality-Theoretic treatment proposed by Hammond (1999), whose analysis requires several language-specific constraints which apparently have no cross-linguistic motivation.

English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development.

Children must possess some ability to process input in a meaningful manner to acquire language. The present study reports on data from an experiment investigating 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children's understanding of restrictive relative clauses manipulated for embeddedness and focus. The results of the study showed that English-speaking children acquire right-branching before center-embedded structures. Comparisons made with data from Portuguese-speaking children suggest general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development, and with respect to English, a "clause expansion" approach to processing in development.

The Distribution of Superheavy Syllables in Modern English

The present article offers an Optimality-Theoretic analysis capturing the distribution of 'superheavy syllables' in Modern English, i.e. syllables consisting of a long vowel + consonants), a diphthong + consonant(s), or a short vowel + two or more consonants, e.g. feel, rout, farm. It will be shown that superheavy syllables are restricted to surfacing either (i) in word-final position, (ii) before a compound boundary, or (iii) before a consonant-initial suffix. By contrast, superheavy syllables are typically non-occurring in other environments. In the present article the following theoretical claims are made. First, superheavy syllables are analyzed as trimoraic. Second, environments (i)-(iii) above describe the right edge of a phonological word. The distribution of superheavy syllables is captured below with the constraint ALIGN-3μ, which ensures that the third mora in a syllable be situated at the right edge of a phonological word. Finally, ALIGN-3μ will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) word-internal cases, e.g. the syllable [aun] in mountain; such facts will be accounted for by various language-specific constraint rankings. The present surface based analysis will be argued to be superior to an earlier one proposed for Modern English in a derivational framework by Borowsky (1986, 1989).

Intuitive syllabification: universals and language specific constraints

ABSTRACTIntuitive syllabifications of 50 five- and six- and 50 eight-year-old children are studied in an experimental setting. The children syllabified Dutch disyllabic words with a single intervocalic consonant that were presented orally to them. The aim was to find out if these syllabifications adhered to the universal principles of syllable structure and if the children's syllabifications witnessed an overruling of the universal phonological constraints by language specific ones. Results indicate that universal principles are sufficient to explain syllabifications. Except for obligatory onset formation, other principles act as soft constraints that are influenced by factors such as stress and vowel and consonant quality. A language specific constraint proposed in the phonological literature, namely bimoraic minimality, is hypothesized to be a result of children's familiarization with the spelling conventions.

Effects of tempo and stress on German syllable structure

A comprehensive view of German syllable structure is developed based on phonetic and psycholinguistic experimental results supplemented by phonological arguments. The account is based on the interaction between universal factors (sonority/strength constraints, effects of tempo) and language-specific factors (phonotactic constraints, effects of stress). Initial, phonological syllabification reveals the distributional constraints operating in the language. This syllabification is modified by stress and rate of speech in well defined ways. The effect of a faster tempo is to maximize and thus strengthen syllable onsets within the limits predicted by sonority/strength and to minimize and thus weaken codas. This is achieved through resyllabification of stronger consonants onto following weaker ones. The effect of stress is twofold. Stress blocks faster speech resyllabification. It also modifies initial syllabification by making stressed syllables heavier through the acquisition of a branching nucleus, and in faster tempos, a branching rhyme. The effects of syllabification adjustments due to tempo and stress are interpreted as an optimization of syllable structure. The study supports a theory of syllable structure based on the arrangement of segments according to the so-called Sonority Sequencing Principle augmented by language-specific constraints which, in the absence of counteracting factors such as stress, are relaxed in faster tempos.

Semantic constraints on lexical categories

Abstract Children are prodigious word learners, able to gain substantial information about a word's meaning on the basis of even a single encounter with the word in context. Two experiments are reported which test the hypothesis that the notion “possible word meaning” plays a role in constraining the inferences that adult language users make about new words encountered in context. The results indicate that subjects applied implicit knowledge of constraints on possible word meanings in making and evaluating hypotheses about unfamiliar words encountered in context and suggest that implicit knowledge of both universal and language-specific constraints on possible word meanings may contribute to the remarkable speed with which children and adults acquire new words.

Nonlinearity and phonetic segmentation

ESPRIT II basic research action “ACCOR” aims at investigating the articulatory-acoustic correlations in coarticulatory processes in seven European languages (English, French, German, Italian, Irish, Spanish, and Swedish). In order to allow for cross-language comparisons, it is particularly important that partners in the project adopt a common methodology, i.e., standardized investigation tools and normalized measurement procedures at specified locations in the speech signals. The physiologic and acoustic database first needs to be segmented and labeled according to principles that do not preclude any theorical intrepretation. The usual phonetic discretization at segment boundaries that implicitly considers coarticulation as a phonological feature spreading process is rejected. On the contrary, a nonlinear annotation of the articulatory and acoustic events has been adopted, based on the evidence provided by the different channels of information: acoustic sound wave, airflow traces, linguo-palatal contact patterns, jaw and lips movement, etc. From a theoretical point of view, this approach has proven very productive and has given for the data a clear picture of coproduction processes, of the timing relationships among different submotor system activities, and of the dynamic properties of the articulatory gestures. It furthermore provides a sound basis for distinguishing between universal regularities and language-specific constraints. This nonlinear procedure enables a unified interpretation of contradicting results obtained from different scholarly oriented segmentation operations.

Preschoolers' use of superordinate relations in classification and language

Preschoolers' difficulty in accessing superordinate relations in classification contrasts sharply with their facility in accessing superordinate relations in language use. We consider two hypotheses regarding this discrepancy. First, certain aspects of classification tasks may obscure superordinate relations. In free classification tasks, the open-ended instructions leave the choice among possible organization schemes unconstrained, allowing for virtually any grouping (e.g., thematic, idiosyncratic), not necessarily a taxonomic grouping. Second, children's facility with superordinate relations in language may be due to a language-specific constraint in development: Children may interpret novel labels as referring to taxonomic (as opposed to thematic or idiosyncratic) relations. In Experiment I, we used ‘clues’ to focus preschoolers' attention on superordinate relations. Clues were (1) superordinate category labels (Label condition); (2) sets of typical category instances (Instance condition); or (3) typical instances with instructions to consider the instances as a group (Group condition). Four-year-olds classified successfully in all conditions. Three-year-olds classified well with labels, but not with instances; their performance in the Group condition was intermediate. In Experiment II, we focus on the role of labels in superordinate classification. If labels highlight taxonomic relations, then a set of category instances paired with a novel label should serve as an especially effective taxonomic clue. With the introduction of a novel word, 3-year-olds classified as successfully as children provided with known English labels. The powerful relation between language and classification is discussed.