Li/Lt6 Phonology and Morphology

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Li/Lt6 Phonology and Morphology

• Lecture 1
• Phonemes and abstract representations

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Todays topics

• Two theories of mind
• Evidence for abstract mental representations
• Competence vs performance
• Priming
• Phonological alternations
• Evidence for phonemes
• Neutralization
• Language games
• Speech errors
• Loanword phonology and L2 transfer
• Orthography
• Perception
• Discrimination tasks

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Two theories of mind
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The reductionist position

• Popular lay intuition that we store and
  manipulate surface forms
• Priming effects by individual voice
• Once we introduce mechanisms for describing
  word-word correspondences into the grammar, it
  may be possible to dispense with underlying
  representations altogether (see proposals by
  Burzio 1998, Bybee 2001). (Sumner 2003)
• connectionists

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Evidence for abstract URs
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Psychological realitySapir 1933
oak tree

• Basic points
• speech sounds are stored in the mind as abstract
  categories (phonemes)
• These are not always identical to their surface
  manifestations ((allo)phones)
• Speakers think of language in terms of phonemes,
  not phones (i.e. phonemes have psychological
  reality)
• Evidence
• Spelling Alex Thomas (Nootka)
• writes lthi, hugt for he, h?
• writes ltC!gt for 2 different things he was taught
  (T!, R)
• Intuitions
• Southern Paiute
• Tony says pA??BAh for at the water
• Asked to divide the word into syllables, he says
  pA? pAh
• /p t k/ ? ß r ? / V _ no /ß r ?/
• Sarcee
• John Whitney feels that dìníh it makes a sound
  has a final /t/, whereas dìníh this one does
  not (cf. dìníth - í the one who)

maple tree
TREE
NB Sapir needs external evidence to decide if the
two forms he hears as identical are actually
different phonetically
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L1 competence performance
TINk!
by the time infants are starting productive use
of language they can already discriminate almost
all of the phonological contrasts of their native
language. While they cannot yet produce
adult-like forms, they appear, in many respects,
to have adult-like representations, which are
reflected, among other things, in their
vociferous rejections of adult imitations of
their phonologically impoverished productions
(Faber and Best 1994266-7)
Cruttenden 1985
Did you say TINk?
No!!

• Preferential Looking paradigm (Hirsh-Pasek and
  Golinkoff 1993)
• 19-month old infants comprehension of sentence
  like Big Bird is hugging Cookie Monster. Where
  is Big Bird hugging Cookie Monster?
• Infants (who cant speak yet) looked longer at
  correct video

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competence vs. performance

• intoxicated speech of the captain of the Exxon
  Valdez (Johnson, Pisoni, and Bernacki 1990)
• Observed effects
• misarticulation of /r/ and /l/
• final devoicing
• Deaffrication
• Performance problem, not different grammar
• attempts at producing adult phen pen collected
  from a 15-month-old child in a 30-minute period
  (Ferguson 1986)
• mã?, v?, dedn, hIn, mbõ, pHIn,
  tHn?tHn?tHn?, bah, dhau?, buã

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competence vs. performance

• Bedore, Leonard, and Gandour 1994
• 4 yr old girl substitutes dental click for s z S
  Z tS dZ
• She can initially imitate the fricatives, but not
  produce them on her own
• After a short training session, she starts to
  produce s correctly
• She then immediately gets all the others right
• the rapid rate of change observed in the childs
  phonological system seems consistent with a
  phonological learning model in which the child
  has adult-like underlying phonological
  representations (283)

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Priming

• Colloquial Dutch optionally neutralizes obstruent
  voicing with the clitic -der her
• /ik kœs der/ I kiss her ? ik kœzd?r ik
  kœst?r
• /ik kiz der/ I kiss her ? ik kizd?r ik
  kist?r
• Do speakers respond faster to targets that match
  the voicing of a prime?
• Lexical decision task, with following sequence of
  events
• PRIME (verbclitic construction)
• TARGET (verbal infinitive or nonword)
• DECISION (is the target a legitimate word of
  Dutch?)
• Results
• Responses were faster when voicing of prime
  corresponded to voicing of UR
• Conclusion
• Both variants of a verb are not stored in the
  lexicon

Jongman, Allard. 2004. Phonological and Phonetic
Representations The Case of Neutralization.
Proceedings of the 2003 Texas Linguistics Society
Conference Coarticulation in Speech Production
and Perception, Augustine Agwuele, Willis Warren,
and Sang-Hoon Park, eds., pp. 9-16.
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Japanese g? and rendaku (Ito and Mester 2003)

• Rendaku C ? voi / __ X
• kami-kaze vs. ori-gami
• Lymans Law X does not contain voi, -son
• taba bundle satsutaba wad of bills
  (satsu-daba)
• g-weakening non-initial /g/ ? ?
• gaijiN foreigner
• koku?ai abroad
• Rule interaction
• R feeds GW /orikami/ ? ori?ami
• R counterfeeds GW /sakatoge/ reverse thorn/ ?
  sakato?e

If GW preceded R it would change g to ? and
thereby feed R, resulting in sakado?e
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Evidence for abstract phonemes
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Phonemes are also abstractions
Ambiguity German devoicing
Rad
Rat
?At
nom. gen.
?Ad?s ?At?s
? voiced uvular fricative cf. French, Hebrew
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Perception
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Categorical perception VOT

• Categorization functions for synthetic stimuli
  ranging from b to p. Open circles indicate
  the percent of times that each stimulus was
  perceived as b, and the filled circles indicate
  the percent of times that each stimulus was
  perceived as p. (Lisker and Abramson 1970)

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Hearing Cs that arent there IThe McGurk effect

• When hearing the sound BA, while seeing GA
• most adults (98) think they are hearing DA

McGurk, H. and MacDonald, J. 1976. Hearing lips
and seeing voices. Nature 264746-8.
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Hearing Cs that arent there IIV formants ? ? C
?
Identification of burstless stops with different
vowels transitions areall you need!
Delattre, Liberman, Cooper (1955) JASA 27,
769-773
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Phonemes vs. allophones

• t th in English (allophonic) vs. Thai
  (phonemic)
• Speakers produce consistent and finely controlled
  distinctions between allophones
• When measured experimentally, subjects typically
  distinguish allophones at above chance levels,
  but much less easily and well than phoneme pairs
• for aspiration in English, see Pegg Werker
  1997, Whalen et al. 1997, Utman et al. 2000,
  Jones 2001

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L2 transfer
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Phoneme vs. allophone

• Phonemes can distinguish meaning (flight
  fright)
• Allophones dont

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Orthography
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Phonological mediation

• In semantic disambiguation tasks, the phonology
  of a word interfered with the disambiguation
  process even when the reader had access to its
  semantic representations (Van Orden 1987).
• reader was presented with IS THIS A FLOWER?
• followed by the presentation of ROWS
• Correct response accuracy for such
  sentence-target pair was significantly lower when
  the targets shared a phonological representation
  with a word neighbor that semantically fit the
  question (i.e., ROSE).
• when the subject had the ability to resolve the
  task with the correct answer (NO) phonological
  information intervened.

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Letter priming

• Lee and Turvey 2003
• forms with deleted silent letters (SALM, COLUM)
  prime better than forms with deleted pronounced
  letters (COUSI)
• Conclusion phonological representations are
  activated during visual word recognition.

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Speech errors
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Types of speech errors
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Language games
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Backwards English

• Cowan Leavitt 1992 study of one woman
• Example garage graž reversed as žarg
• Evidence that she reverses phonemes (rather than
  letters)
• 1. no silent letters pronounced in reverse forms
• 2. homographs were always pronounced differently
  (two ltggt's in garage)
• Not functioning as reversed tape recorders
• Compound units (diphthongs and affricates) were
  consistently preserved as units rather than being
  reversed.
• choice tšojs was reversed as sojtš (rather
  than sjošt)

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Verlan

• Procedure
• Invert syllables (in polysyllabic words)
• Lenvers the reverse ? verlan, femme woman
  ? meuf
• Cf. Spanish Vesre, which inverts syllable order,
  e.g. muchacho ? chochamu
• Drop final vowel
• What to do with monosyllables?
• Include final optional schwa, if there is one
• moi mwa me ? ouam wam
• fou fu crazy ? ouf
• Viens chez ouam soir-ce y'a une teuf de ouf, je
  suis avec l'autre nasbo, j ai du sky et la race
  de beuh
• Come to my place tonight there is a huge party,
  I'm with this hot chick, I've got some whiskey
  and a lot of weed
• teuf - fête party, nasbo bonasse hot chick,
  sky whiskey, beuh herbe weed
• Key for us monosyllables ? inversion of phonemes

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Conclusions

• Words are not acoustic signals, but rather
  abstract mental representations of language.
• Words in turn are composed of abstract phonemes,
  which are again abstract mental symbols rather
  than elements of the physical world.

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References

• Bedore, L., L. Leonard, and Jack Gandour. 1994.
  The substitution of a click for sibilants a case
  study. Clinical linguistics phonetics
  8.4283-293.
• Bishop, D. and J. Robson. 1989. Accurate non-word
  spelling despite congenital inability to speak
  phoneme-grapheme conversion does not require
  subvocal articulation. British Journal of
  Psychology 80.11-13.
• Burzio, Luigi. 1998. Multiple Correspondence.
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• Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and Language Use.
  Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
• Cowan, Nelson L. Leavitt. 1992. Speakers'
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  Conference Coarticulation in Speech Production
  and Perception, Augustine Agwuele, Willis Warren,
  and Sang-Hoon Park, eds., pp. 9-16.
• Krifi et al. 2003 phonological features shared
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