Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Articulatory variability and fricative noise in apical vowels

Matthew Faytak

Susan Lin

2015

Standard Mandarin (SM) apical vowels have tongue postures similar to the fricative consonants that obligatorily precede them, but are thought to lack the consonants’ fricative noise. Lee-Kim [10] argues that in SM apical vowels, a slight reduction of constriction at the tongue blade or tip reduces fricative noise, essentially resulting in syllabic approximants. Using lingual ultrasound to examine articulation of apical vowels in SM, we argue that other articulatory adjustments may also limit frication in apical vowels, but that these strategies are implemented variably such that some...

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Contrastive and non-contrastive pre-stopping in Kaytetye

Mark Harvey

Susan Lin

Ben Davies

Katherine Demuth

2015

Kaytetye is one of the few Australian languages for which pre-stopping is contrastive for nasals. This paper provides the first quantitative data on the phonetic realization of contrastive pre-stopping for any Australian language. It also provides data on the hitherto unreported non-contrastive pre-stopping of laterals in Kaytetye. The findings demonstrate that contrastive nasal pre-stopping and non-contrastive lateral pre-stopping differ on three parameters: (a) the conditioning on the distribution of plain vs. pre-stopped realizations; (b) the comparative overall durations of pre-...

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The A-map model: Articulatory reliability in child-specific phonology

Tara McAllister Byun

Sharon Inkelas

Yvan Rose

2016

This article addresses a phenomenon of long-standing interest: the existence of child-specific phonological patterns that are not attested in adult language. We propose a new theoretical approach, termed the A(rticulatory)-map model, to account for the origin and elimination of child-specific phonological patterns. Due to the performance limitations imposed by structural and motor immaturity, children’s outputs differ from adult target forms in both systematic and sporadic ways. The computations of the child’s grammar are influenced by the distributional properties of motor-acoustic traces...

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Plural exponence in the Nez Perce DP: a DM analysis

Amy Rose Deal

2016

This paper analyzes two patterns of number marking in the DP in Nez Perce (Sahaptian) within the framework of Distributed Morphology. The first involves under-realization of plural on nouns. Number has classically been understood as a feature inherent to nouns, rather than to adjectives that modify them. In Nez Perce, however, only a small set of nouns show number morphology, whereas number morphology is highly productive on adjectival modifiers. Adjectives in fact may realize the plural more than once per word—an instance of multiple exponence. I show that the puzzle of under-...