This study explores the role of paradigm uniformity bias in the acquisition of Korean verbal inflections. Paradigm uniformity bias has been proposed in a constraint-based phonological framework, but has rarely been supported by experimental data. This paper provides experimental evidence for paradigm uniformity bias from four- to seven-year-old Korean children learning their native language phonology. Experiment 1 demonstrates that children alter morphological structures in order to produce non-alternating verb forms. Experiment 2 shows that the tendency to adjust morphological structures is rooted in children's preference for uniform paradigms, not in their ignorance of alternations. The results suggest that paradigm uniformity bias plays a role in determining children's preferred production patterns, which favour non-alternating forms even after they have acquired adult-like knowledge of the patterns of alternations.

Recent work under the theoretical banner of Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) has produced a variety of different – and sometimes contradictory – formulations of the constraints central to this framework. In OT, the effects of such definitional choices come out in the factorial typologies they predict. Yet knowing what languages a theoretical system derives is insufficient unless we know why it does so. This requires analysis of the internal ranking structures of the typology itself. This paper compares the typologies produced under different proposed modifications to the main ABC constraints. We analyse the typologies in Property Theory, a theory of typological organisation in OT. Our analyses show that all variations have a common core structure, and that differences in their factorial typologies reduce to differences in how this common structure expands and iterates for different features. This allows for precise delineation of how and why different ABC constraint definitions affect typologies.

This paper gives a computational characterisation of opaque interactions in phonology. Specifically, a range of opaque interactions are shown to be Input Strictly Local (ISL) maps (Chandlee 2014), which are string-to-string functions that determine output based only on contiguous sequences of input symbols. Examples from Baković’s (2007) extended typology of counterfeeding, counterbleeding, self-destructive feeding, non-gratuitous feeding and cross-derivational feeding, as well as a case of fed counterfeeding from Kavitskaya & Staroverov (2010), are all given ISL analyses, which show that these interactions can be computed based on sequences of bounded length in the input. It is discussed how ISL maps are restrictive in their typological predictions, have guaranteed learning results and known methods for generation and recognition, and thus compare favourably to rule-based and constraint-based approaches to these interactions.

Phonotactic generalisations can be computed at different levels of granularity, from a coarse-grained legal/illegal dichotomy (blick, dwick ≻ *bnick, *lbick) to a fine-grained gradient of acceptability (blick ≻ dwick ≻ bnick ≻ lbick). This article investigates the sensitivity of the English metrical parse to the granularity of medial onset phonotactics. We present two experiments that feature pseudo-words with medial consonants and CC clusters varying in word-edge frequency and sonority (e.g. vatablick, vatadwick, vatabnick, vatalbick). The metrical parse is inferred from a hyphenation experiment and an online stress-assignment experiment. The results of both studies indicate that the parse is stochastic, and guided by relatively fine-grained phonotactic dependencies. Vocabulary simulations suggest that this level of granularity may arise because the gradient parser consistently outperforms the coarse-grained alternative across the developing lexicon.

This paper contributes to the typology of laryngeal harmony by analysing an unusual case of long-distance laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions and alternations in Lezgian. This pattern, previously unmentioned in the phonological literature, is the first known case of alternations involving ejective harmony. In Lezgian, local processes mask the interaction of ejectives and plain voiceless stops. This is robustly supported by our dictionary analysis, which reveals a ban on the co-occurrence of ejectives and plain voiceless stops within the foot. Both harmony alternations and static co-occurrence restrictions are sensitive to foot structure, unlike previous cases of consonant harmony. Harmony also interacts opaquely with vowel syncope, and certain co-occurrences of plain and ejective stops are resolved with dissimilation rather than harmony, showing a conspiracy to avoid co-occurrences. We demonstrate an account within the Agreement by Correspondence framework and discuss implications for the typology and analysis of consonant harmony.

This study is concerned with the identifiability of intonational phrase boundaries across familiar and unfamiliar languages. Four annotators segmented a corpus of more than three hours of spontaneous speech into intonational phrases. The corpus included narratives in their native German, but also in three languages of Indonesia unknown to them. The results show significant agreement across the whole corpus, as well as for each subcorpus. We discuss the interpretation of these results, including the hypothesis that it makes sense to distinguish between phonetic and phonological intonational phrases, and that the former are a universal characteristic of speech, allowing listeners to segment speech into intonational phrase-sized units even in unknown languages.

The term ‘environmental shielding’ has been used to refer to a class of processes in which the phonetic realisation of a nasal stop depends on its vocalic context. In Chiriguano, for example, nasal consonants are realised as such before nasal vowels (/mã/ → [mã]), but acquire an oral release before oral vowels (/ma/ → [mba]). Herbert (1986) claims that shielding protects a contrast between oral and nasal vowels: if Chiriguano /ma/ were realised as [ma], [a] would likely carry some degree of nasal coarticulation, and be less distinct from nasal /ã/. This article provides new arguments for Herbert's position, drawn from a large typological study of South American languages. I argue that environmental shielding is contrast preservation, and that any successful analysis of shielding must make explicit reference to contrast. These results contribute to a growing body of evidence that constraints on contrast are an essential component of phonological theory.

This paper presents an extension of indexed constraints, such that they can apply not only to individual morphemes, but also to potentially complex constituents such as the stem. This modification allows us to capture a class of long-distance morphologically derived environment effects (MDEEs) that have been previously unexplained. MDEEs typically involve an exceptional phonological pattern that is lost under affixation. Formally, MDEEs are predicted if complex constituents such as stems are treated as lexically exceptional only when every morpheme contained within them is independently exceptional. This approach further predicts asymmetries between bare roots and affixed words, between roots and affixes, and between inflected and derived words. All other things being equal, the first of each pair is more likely to be exceptional in more contexts.

In the Southern Bavarian variety of Tyrolean, laryngeal contrasts undergo a typologically interesting process of neutralisation in word-initial position. We undertake an acoustic analysis of Tyrolean stops in word-initial, word-medial intersonorant and word-final contexts, as well as in obstruent clusters, investigating the role of the acoustic parameters VOT, prevoicing, closure duration and F0 and H1–H2* on following vowels in implementing contrast, if any. Results show that stops contrast word-medially via [voice] (supported by the acoustic cues of closure duration and F0), and are neutralised completely in word-final position and in obstruent clusters. Word-initially, neutralisation is subject to inter- and intraspeaker variability, and is sensitive to place of articulation. Aspiration plays no role in implementing laryngeal contrasts in Tyrolean.

This article introduces basic principles of a generative theory of phonology that unifies aspects of parallel constraint-based theories and serial rule-based theories. In the core of the grammar are phonological processes that consist of a markedness constraint and a repair. Processes are universal, but every language activates a different set, and applies them in different orders. Phonological processes may be in bleeding or feeding relations. These two basic relations are sufficient to define more complicated interactions, such as blocking, derived and non-derived environment effects, chain shifts and allophony.

In Harmonic Grammar, positional licensing interacts with faithfulness constraints in pathological ways: spreading a feature to a licensing position to satisfy positional licensing can incur many faithfulness violations, and if there are sufficiently many such violations, they gang up to block spreading. This problem is solved if positional licensing is recast as a positive constraint that rewards licensed features in proportion to the number of positions they are associated with, thereby countering faithfulness's multiple violations. This proposal provides support for positive constraints, calls into question arguments against gradient constraints and lays the groundwork for a sound theory of positional licensing in Harmonic Grammar.

Various German dialects delete certain word-final plosives in plural forms (e.g. [hʊnt] ‘dog’ vs. [hʊn] ‘dogs’). I claim that this type of subtractive pluralisation is best analysed as an epiphenomenon resulting from the affixation of a disyllabic trochaic foot. This metrical template can create word-final empty-headed syllables; subtraction targets the onset of these syllables. Independent evidence comes from related phenomena, for the first time unified in a comprehensive account. Firstly, all varieties with word-final consonant subtraction delete the same consonants in the onset of post-tonic syllables containing a vowel. Additionally, some dialects display predictable interactions of consonant subtraction with either vowel shortening or the assignment of tonal accent. The proposal in this paper supports the idea that morphology is generally additive, and that subtraction can be derived from prosodic affixation. I thus argue that using more sophisticated independently motivated phonological representations can help to simplify the morphological grammar.

Consonant epenthesis is typically assumed to be part of the basic repertoire of phonological grammars. This implies that there exists some set of linguistic data for which epenthesis is the best analysis. However, a series of artificial grammar learning experiments found no evidence that learners ever selected an epenthesis analysis. Instead, phonetic and morphological biases were revealed, along with individual variation in how learners generalised and regularised their input. These results, in combination with previous work, suggest that synchronic consonant epenthesis may only emerge very rarely, as a result of a gradual accumulation of changes over time. It is argued that stored stem–allomorph pairs should be adopted as the null hypothesis in cases of potential epenthesis, and that a universal criterion is needed for rejecting this hypothesis. Such a criterion requires a formal theory of exceptions, a necessity for falsifiability in phonological theory.

In her study published in this journal, Newlin-Łukowicz (2012) calls into question the existence of bidirectional stress systems. The argument hinges on the failure to detect acoustic correlates of word-internal subsidiary stress in Polish, the language hitherto considered to be a classic example of metrical bidirectionality. This paper reappraises the issue, reporting on an acoustic study of paired five- and six-syllable words in Polish (e.g. ˎpomido′rowy – ˎpomiˎdoro-′wego). The results indicate that the words differ significantly with respect to relative consonant duration (PVI values) in the onset of the third syllable, depending on whether the syllable bears subsidiary stress (as in six-syllable words) or remains unstressed (as in five-syllable words). Similar effects are reported in the initial syllable, but not in the second syllable, which remains consistently unstressed. The conclusion is that Polish has iterative stress, corroborating its traditional description as having a bidirectional stress system.

This paper uses novel data showing gradient labial harmony in Kazakh to compare Kaun's (1995) feature-based analysis with a dispersion-based analysis in a Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar. The paper demonstrates that the dispersion-based analysis better fits the Kazakh data than Kaun's analysis, and then extends it to account for four languages with harmony patterns different from that in Kazakh. The paper also argues that the dispersion-based account provides a better analysis of the typology of labial harmony than Kaun's feature-based analysis.

Many previous studies have argued that phonology may leave some phonetic dimensions unspecified in surface representations. We introduce computational tools for assessing this possibility though simulation and classification of phonetic trajectories. The empirical material used to demonstrate the approach comes from electromagnetic articulography recordings of high-vowel devoicing in Japanese. Using Discrete Cosine Transform, tongue-dorsum movement trajectories are decomposed into a small number of frequency components (cosines differing in frequency and amplitude) that correspond to linguistically meaningful signal modulations, i.e. articulatory gestures. Stochastic generators of competing phonological hypotheses operate in this frequency space. Distributions over frequency components are used to simulate (i) the vowel-present trajectories and (ii) the vowel-absent trajectories. A Bayesian classifier trained on simulations assigns posterior probabilities to unseen data. Results indicate that /u/ is optionally produced without a vowel-height specification in Tokyo Japanese and that the frequency of such targetlessness varies systematically across phonological environments.

It has been observed that the trigger and target in labial harmony are sometimes required to share a particular feature. Working within the framework of Radical CV Phonology, I argue that labial harmony is always subject to further requirements, stated in terms of additional licensing relations. Radical CV Phonology uses a limited set of elements that can be involved in such licensing, resulting in a restricted typology of labial harmony. Furthermore, I propose a distinction between lexical elements, which are always visible, and elements derived through harmony, which become visible in cycles. Crucially, elements derived through labial harmony do not have access to elements derived through tongue-root harmony, thus accounting for the lack of labial harmony in high vowels in tongue-root harmony systems. This architecture also accounts naturally for the behaviour of /i/, which is opaque to labial harmony in Tungusic languages but transparent to labial harmony in Mongolic languages.

Jardine (2016) claims that tonal phonology is more formally complex than the phonology of other segmental features, in that only tonal phonology goes beyond the class of weakly deterministic maps. He then goes on to argue that this formal distinction is superior to any available treatment in Optimality Theory. This reply points out that Jardine's formal distinction conflates attested and unattested tonal patterns, which can be distinguished in Optimality Theory, given a substantively defined constraint set.

This paper presents evidence against the existence of sonority-driven stress in Gujarati. Gujarati is one of the clearest and most revealing cases of sonority-driven stress with distinctions among peripheral vowels. A production experiment was performed to determine the accuracy of the claim that [a] attracts stress away from the default position. Of the five types of phonetic evidence examined, only F1 provides clear evidence for stress, revealing stress to be consistently penultimate, and not sonority-driven. As Gujarati is one of the core cases of sonority-driven stress, this finding challenges the claim that it exists. However, this paper does not exclude the possibility that stress may avoid schwa (or central vowels), as reported for several languages. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed, particularly for theories that have a ‘symmetric effect’ and for descriptions that are impressionistic.