Phonological Explanation Research Articles

Definite Article Reduction and The Obligatory Contour Principle in York English1

AbstractThis paper provides a phonological explanation for an observed pattern of Definite Article Reduction (DAR) in the city of York, northeast Yorkshire, England. Following a pattern common among very high frequency function words in English, the vowel‐less reduced definite article variably attaches leftward as s clitic. The cliticised definite article is subsequently affaected by the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). The phonetic realisations accommodated by this explanation include a non‐glottalised variant that is perceptually a zero realisation. Sociolinguistic observations indicate that older speakers and more locally‐oriented young, working‐class men are most likely to have acquired the phonological subtleties of this pattern.

Unexceptional segments

A famous perennial problem in Slavic phonology is yers: vowels that idiosyncratically alternate with zero (e.g., [mox] vs. [mx-a] ‘moss (nom/gen sg)’ alongside [nos] vs. [nos-a] ‘nose (nom/gen sg)’). The widely accepted analysis of these “ghost vowels” is that they must be underlyingly marked as exceptional on a segment-by-segment basis. Moreover, usually they are assumed to be underlyingly representationally defective—either nonmoraic or lacking features (Kenstowicz and Rubach 1987, inter alia). In this paper, I revisit yers from a different perspective. Instead of treating the segments as special, I argue that exceptionality is a property of whole morphemes. This theory of exceptionality has many incarnations (Chomsky and Halle 1968 et seq.), but my version is formalized as Lexically Indexed Constraints in Optimality Theory: in any given language, a universal constraint can be indexed to individual morphemes in the lexicon and ranked in two different positions in the language’s hierarchy (Pater 2000, 2006). In Russian, the relevant indexed constraint is *Mid, which penalizes the peripheral mid vowels [e] and [o]. The general, non-indexed constraint is independently needed to explain vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. The indexed version explains why only mid vowels alternate with zero in Russian. This generalization about yer quality is lost in representational accounts, since any vowel can be labeled as nonmoraic underlyingly. Another unsolved mystery about Russian yers is that only vowels in the final syllable of a morpheme can alternate with zero. This requires a phonological explanation—labeling only the alternating vowels as underlyingly special does not address the position problem.

Visual rapid naming and phonological abilities: Different subtypes in dyslexic children

One implication of the double-deficit hypothesis for dyslexia is that there should be subtypes of dyslexic readers that exhibit rapid naming deficits with or without concomitant phonological processing problems. In the current study, we investigated the validity of this hypothesis for Portuguese orthography, which is more consistent than English orthography, by exploring different cognitive profiles in a sample of dyslexic children. In particular, we were interested in identifying readers characterized by a pure rapid automatized naming deficit. We also examined whether rapid naming and phonological awareness independently account for individual differences in reading performance. We characterized the performance of dyslexic readers and a control group of normal readers matched for age on reading, visual rapid naming and phonological processing tasks. Our results suggest that there is a subgroup of dyslexic readers with intact phonological processing capacity (in terms of both accuracy and speed measures) but poor rapid naming skills. We also provide evidence for an independent association between rapid naming and reading competence in the dyslexic sample, when the effect of phonological skills was controlled. Altogether, the results are more consistent with the view that rapid naming problems in dyslexia represent a second core deficit rather than an exclusive phonological explanation for the rapid naming deficits. Furthermore, additional non-phonological processes, which subserve rapid naming performance, contribute independently to reading development.

Acquisition of /s/ clusters in English-speaking children with phonological disorders

Two member onset consonant clusters with /s/ as the first member (#sC onsets) behave differently from other double onset consonant clusters in English. Phonological explanations of children's consonant cluster production have been posited to predict children's speech acquisition. The aim of this study was to consider the role of the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), homorganicity, headedness, and factorial typology in the explanation of productions of consonant clusters by children with phonological disorders. Thirty monolingual English-speaking children with phonological disorders produced words commencing with #sC: /s/+stop (/sT/), /s/+nasal (/sN/), /sl/, and /sw/. There was wide individual variation between participants. Overall, there was an increase in accuracy of consonant cluster production as the sonority indices of the second element of the cluster increased: there was significantly greater accuracy of /sl/ than /sN/ and significantly greater accuracy of /sN/ than /sT/. However, /sw/ targets only followed the SSP for phonologically accurate (but not phonetically accurate) productions. Correct renditions justified the binary grouping of the SSP-following vs SSP-violating separation. Homorganicity of the cluster was not a factor in determining relative accuracy of the targets. The percentage of correct renditions justified the /s/+[−continuant] vs /s/+[+continuant] binary separation. There were several counterexamples of predictions of the headedness approach. Thus, sonority and factorial typology were found to be useful in predicting /s/ consonant cluster acquisition of children with phonological disorders.

Natural Phonology as a Functional Theory

Natural Phonology as a Functional Theory This paper presents Natural Phonology as a functional theory. Natural Phonology is shown to be functional in two senses: as focusing on explanation and thus increasing our understanding of how language works, and as having practical applications, especially to second language acquisition and speech therapy. The contribution argues that crucial as formalism is in computational linguistics and speech technology, Natural Phonology, with less rigid and less formalized claims, has important applications in the areas where language and not totally predictable human factors are involved. The paper discusses approaches to autonomy in language, explanation and hypothesis in Natural Phonology, and applications of Natural Phonology.

Revisiting Jarrod: Applications of gestural phonology theory to the assessment and treatment of speech sound disorder

Gestural phonology theory questions the dominance of phonological explanations of speech sound disorder in light of technological advances in the measurement of speech articulation. A gestural phonology approach investigates the movements of articulators rather than higher level phonological forms, suggesting that many speech sound disorders are the result of difficulties generating and coordinating articulatory gestures. This has significant implications for assessment and treatment, as new methods are required to investigate articulatory gestures. This article revisits the case of Jarrod, who was the feature of a special issue of Advances in Speech-Language Pathology 8(3) which provided perspectives on a child with unintelligible speech. Jarrod's assessment data is re-evaluated in light of gestural phonology theory and technological advancements in assessment of speech. Non-standard assessment techniques such as pause distribution analysis, vowel quadrilateral and spectral moment analysis are applied to investigate articulatory movement. Results indicate difficulties with fine force control, coupled with difficulties with timing of articulation, resulting in marked unintelligibility. Treatment recommendations based on these results are presented, incorporating the principles of gestural phonology and dynamic systems theory.

Universals in phonology

This article asks what is universal about phonological systems. Beginning with universals of segment inventories, a distinction is drawn between descriptive universals (where the effect of different theoretical frameworks is minimized) vs. analytic universals (which are specific-theory-dependent). Since there are few absolute universals such as “all languages have stops” and “all languages have at least two degrees of vowel height”, theory-driven or “architectural” universals concerning distinctive features and syllable structure are also considered. Although several near-universals are also mentioned, the existence of conflicting “universal tendencies” and contradictory resolutions naturally leads into questions concerning the status of markedness and synchronic explanation in phonology. While diachrony is best at accounting for typologically unusual and language-specific phonological properties, the absolute universals discussed in this study are clearly grounded in synchrony.

Le suffixe -ëi- dans la première conjugaison du badiot

The insertion of inflectional suffixes in the verbal paradigm is a widespread phenomenon, characteristic of Romance verbal morphology. Traditionally, there are two types of hypotheses that concern verbal amplifications: on the one hand there is a phonological explanation that relies on the criterion of the “generalization of stress”, on the other hand there is a semantic-functional hypothesis based on the theory of verbal aspect. This contribution proposes an analysis of the suffix -ëi- that appears in the verbal forms with stressed stem in the Badiot dialect, one of the idioms of the central Ladin group. The confrontation of the traditional hypotheses with a corpus of 2040 verbs of the first conjugation of the Badiot dialect, reveals that neither the phonological hypothesis nor the semantic-functional hypothesis can account for the insertion of the suffix. An alternative hypothesis is proposed, wich considers stress in a paradigmatic perspective wich that explains the presence of the suffix by the generalization of the metrical structure associated with the lexical stem of the infinitive.

Influence of phonology on morpho‐syntax in Romance languages in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

The profiles of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) differ greatly according to the language they speak. The Surface Hypothesis attempts to explain these differences through the theory that children with SLI will incorrectly produce elements in their language with low phonological weights or that are produced in a non-canonical prosodic structure. Previous studies have shown that the most characteristics errors produced by Catalan and Spanish-speaking children with SLI include function word omission (morpho-syntax) and weak syllable omission (phonology). The omission of function words points to a morpho-syntactic explanation of SLI, while weak syllable omission supports a phonological explanation of SLI. Yet, function words are weak syllables; thus, it is possible that the same mechanism underlies both problems. Data were extracted from spontaneous language produced by five children with SLI and five comparison children matched for age and MLU-w. They were assessed on two occasions: at 3;10 and 4;9 years of age. These interviews were then transcribed and the morphological and phonological errors coded. A non-parametric mean analysis and various regression analyses were conducted. The results show that function word omission and weak syllable omission were the most characteristic errors made by Spanish and Catalan-speaking children with SLI and established that omissions increase as prosodic weight decreases. They also indicated that weak syllabic omission may explain most function word omissions. The data support the Surface Hypothesis and suggest that the same impaired mechanism may underlie the morphological and phonological problems SLI children display.

Universals in Phonology

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2007) (Commissioned for special issue of The Linguistic Review, 2008, Harry van der Hulst, ed.) Universals in Phonology Larry Hyman A BSTRACT This article asks what is universal about phonological systems. Beginning with universals of segment inventories, a distinction is drawn between descriptive universals (where the effect of different theoretical frameworks is minimized) vs. analytic universals (which are specific-theory- dependent). Since there are few absolute universals such as “all languages have stops” and “all languages have at least two degrees of vowel height”, theory-driven or “architectural” universals concerning distinctive features and syllable structure are also considered. Although several near- universals are also mentioned, the existence of conflicting “universal tendencies” and contradictory resolutions naturally leads into questions concerning the status of markedness and synchronic explanation in phonology. While diachrony is best at accounting for typologically unusual and language-specific phonological properties, the absolute universals discussed in this study are clearly grounded in synchrony. Introduction My colleague John Ohala likes to tell the following mythical story about a lecture that the legendary Roman Jakobson gives upon arrival at Harvard University some time in the 1940s. The topic is child language and phonological universals, a subject which Prof. Jakobson addresses in his Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (1941). In his also legendary strong Russian accent, Jakobson makes the pronouncement, “In all languages, first utterance of child, [pa]!” 1 He goes on to explain that it is a matter of maximal opposition: “[p] is the consonant most consonant, and [a] is the vowel most vowel.” As the joke continues, a very concerned person in the audience raises his hand and is called on: “But, professor, my child’s first utterance was [tSik].” Prof. Jakobson carefully considers this surprising remark. In his mind he systematically compares [tS] and [p], [i] and [a], and [k] and O, obviously with some concern. He then asks the man the following questions: “Did your child have any other initial consonant than [tS]?” The man answers no. “Did your child have any other vowel than [i]?” Again, the man answers no. “My last question: Did your child always have the final [k]?” “Yes,” the man replies. At this point Prof. Jakobson’s face lights up as he triumphantly exclaims: “Axa! Don’t you see? Phonyetic [tSik], phonological /pa/!” The above joke, I assume totally fabricated, never fails to get a laugh out of phonologists, who, I suspect, see a bit of themselves in this caricature. While funny, there is in fact a serious undertone to the above exchange. The story is quite impressive in how succinctly it reveals several major questions we face as phonologists interested in universal properties of sound systems: (1) What level of representation are we interested in? (2) How different can the levels be from each other? (3) What are the limits of theoretical interpretation? (4) How can claims of universality be validated or falsified? In other words, if [tSik] is not a counterexample to the claim, what would be? Cf. “Ordinary child language begins, and the aphasic dissolution of language preceding its complete loss ends, with what psychopathologists have termed the ‘labial stage’. In this phase speakers are capable only of one type of utterance, which is usually transcribed as /pa/” (Jakobson and Halle 1956:37).

Voice alternation as passive lenition: /ᴚ/ in French

The rhotic or "r-like sound" of Standard European French is a segment varying in manner, both degree of aperture and voice quality. This paper presents a broadly functional analysis of /ᴚ/ voicing within an Optimality Theoretic framework, accounting for instances of voice assimilation, neutralization and apparent free variation. Autosegmental analysis of /ᴚ/ voice alternation is critiqued based on its inability to account for voice patterns. A lenition-based approach, taking into account active and passive voicing mechanisms, is proposed, from which alternations between voiced and voiceless /ᴚ/ are seen as the result of principled phonological processes involving effort avoidance and reduction. This analysis supports a representation of /ᴚ/ that is unspecified for active glottal control; essentially, the output or surface instantiation of /ᴚ/ derives from its phonological environment, as constrained by universal principles of effort reduction or avoidance. These principles are articulated in grounded constraints LAZY(glot), targeting glottal or laryngeal effort. Other issues raised include the integration of phonetic principles in phonological explanation, the justification for input or underlying representations of variant phonemes and the heuristic capabilities of proposed constraints. A concluding section comprises a discussion of the data and the conception of voice as a phonological category.

Palatalization in West Chadic

Morphological palatalization is a phenomenon whereby palatal articulation (fronting of vowels, adding palatalization as a secondary articulation to consonants, changing alveolars to alveopalatals) is a property associated with an entire morpheme, not with individual segments. Within the Chadic language family, morphological palatalization is best documented in the Biu-Mandara branch, but it has been inherited as a feature in the West branch as well. This paper explores palatalization phenomena in the West Branch that conceivably trace their origin to morphological palatalization. In Miya, morphological palatalization operates much as it does in Biu-Mandara languages, affecting entire morphemes and associating with specific morphological processes. Duwai exhibits remnants of morphological palatalization in certain verb alternations. Bole shows alveolar/alveopalatal variations in specific lexical items that have no local phonological explanation. In Hausa, the origin of palatal consonants has long been a source of controversy. The paper argues that local phonological processes of palatalization cannot account for a large number of the palatals in modern Hausa, a claim that has implications for the analysis of the system of high vowels.

Acquiring the phonology of lexical tone in infancy

Phonology is bimodular: prosody (relational aspects) and melody (‘phonetic’ aspects) are to some extent autonomous in steady-state (adult) language. Therefore the acquisition of individual melodic and prosodic modules and their subsequent orientation with respect to one another must constitute three different developmental tasks. The acquisition of melodic primes may take place independently of any other process. If infant perception has this kind of phonological import, then disparate phonetic reflexes which are predicted as phonologically identical might show parallels in acquisition. In Government Phonology, general theory argues that the same abstract melodic objects underlie both laryngeal contrasts in stops and lexical tonal contrasts. Earlier studies show that language-specific attunement to stop contrasts has taken place by the age of six to eight months. Tests on lexical tone perception are now reported, using both adults and infants. The results show that at around six months of age, babies acquiring Yorùbá, a language which has a three-way contrast for tone, attend more closely to pitch changes within the minimal domain word than do English controls. Further, they only attend to those pitch changes that possess phonological import within that domain in the steady-state language. In this their perception exactly parallels that displayed by the adult speakers. Finally, both adults and infants display a particular asymmetry in perception in that they discriminate the high/mid tone distinction but fail to perceive the mid/low contrast where no linguistic context is present. This was not predicted at the onset of testing, but it is argued that it may well have a phonological explanation, which could align this finding with the typological asymmetries to be found in the distribution of lexical tone in Yorùbá and other west African languages.

Braille Reading by Children: Is there a Phonological Explanation for their Difficulties?

Do problems in learning to read in braille result from the complexity of its symbol system and the tactile processing involved or do findings regarding the role of phonological processing in sighted children also hold when learning to read in Braille? The present Study uses an adapted form of the Phonological Assessment Battery (Frederlckson, Frith & Reason, 1997) to address this question. It compares the phonological skills of two Braille readers, one a struggling learner and the other making good progress, to discuss the notion of phonological dyslexia and Its Implications for Braille teaching.

Subject pronoun and article omissions in the speech of children with specific language impairment: a phonological interpretation.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their MLU-matched normally developing (ND) peers imitated proper nouns, the pronouns he and you, and the article the in subject phrases. Although all of these word types were phonological phrase-initial syllables, the proper nouns received strong stress, but the function words received weak stress. Both groups of children showed significantly more omissions of the function words than the proper nouns. There was no significant difference amongst the imitations of the two pronouns or the article; all were omitted frequently by both groups. This suggests that the status of subject articles and pronouns as weak syllables in the initial position of phonological phrases may in some cases constitute a more important factor than the distinctive grammatical roles they play. A phonological explanation of subject article and pronoun omissions is explored.

Inhibitory effects in form priming: Evaluating a phonological competition explanation.

Inhibitory effects in form priming: Evaluating a phonological competition explanation.

Influence of adjacent pitch accents on each other's perceived prominence: two contradictory effects

In a previous study by Gussenhoven & Rietveld published in the Journal of Phonetics in 1988, in which listeners rated the prominence of the second pitch accent in synthetic utterances containing two pitch accents, it was found that decreasing the F0 on the first pitch accent peak (P1) induced lower prominence ratings on the second (P2). The present study replicates and extends this somewhat unexpected finding. Two groups of naïve subjects rating two slightly different sets of materials showed the Gussenhoven-Rietveld effect (i.e., they gave lower ratings of prominence for P2 as the F0 of P1 decreased). However, they did so only when P2 itself was below about 145Hz in a male speaking range. For higher values of P2 the Gussenhoven-Rietveld effect was reversed: lower prominence ratings were given to P2 as the F0 of P2 increased. Moreover, a group of trained listeners (phoneticians and speech researchers) failed to show the Gussenhoven-Rietveld effect at any level of P2. A broadly phonological explanation for the effect (and for its failure to occur under certain conditions) is proposed, such that, in normal range, the prominences of accents are not assessed individually, but are evaluated as a group to assess the utterance's overall degree of emphasis.

The role of phonology in the teaching of pronunciation to bilingual students

Abstract The paper examines some phonological explanations for pronunciation difficulties experienced by learners of English and Chinese. Rules of accommodation, rules of distribution and alternation, voicing and morphonemic rules are examined. Rules of transfer between related languages are illustrated by examples from Hokkien and Mandarin. Some comments are made also on supra‐segmental phenomena. While ‘rules’ in this sense cannot be taught to learners, an awareness of them on the part of the teacher can aid their acquisition.

The Role of Phonetics within the Study of Language

Phonologists have often held that phonetic 'substance' is more or less unrelated to phonological 'form'. This view rests on assumptions about the phonetic domain that are highly questionable on empirical grounds. Evidence is reviewed suggesting that very few phonetic properties of vowels fail to serve the linguistic function of preserving and enhancing distinctiveness. Accordingly, much of what has been considered to be purely phonetic is also phonological in character: that is to say, the domains of phonetics and phonology overlap significantly. Finally, several well-known criticisms of the program of phonetic explanation in phonology are discussed and rejected.

Explanation in variable phonology: An exponential model of morphological constraints

ABSTRACTVariationist treatments of phonological processes typically provide precise quantitative accounts of the effects of conditioning environmental factors on the occurrence of the process, and these effects have been shown to be robust for several well-studied processes. But comparable precision in theoretical explanation is usually elusive, at the current state of the discipline. That is, the analyst is usually unable to say why the parameters should have the particular values that they do, although one can often explain relative ordering of environments. This article attempts to give a precise explanation — in the form of a quantitative theoretical prediction — of one robust quantitative observation about English phonology. The reduction of final consonant clusters (often called -t,d deletion) is well-known to be conditioned by the morphological structure of a target word. Deletion applies more in monomorphemic words (e.g., mist) than in inflected words (e.g., missed). In the theory of lexical phonology, these classes of words are differentiated by derivational history, acquiring their final clusters at different levels of the morphology. The theory further postulates that rules may apply at more than one level of the derivation. If -t,d deletion is treated as a variable rule with a fixed rate of application (p0) in a phonology with this architecture, then higher rates of application in underived forms (where the final cluster is present underlyingly and throughout the derivation) are a consequence of multiple exposures to the deletion rule, whereas inflected forms (which only meet the structural description of the rule late in the derivation) have fewer exposures and lower cumulative deletion. This further allows a precise quantitative prediction concerning surface deletion rates in the different morphological categories. They should be related as an exponential function of p0, depending on the number of exposures to the rule. The prediction is empirically verified in a study of -t,d deletion in seven English speakers.