Initial consonant groups function as units in word production.

In this study the effect of phonotactic constraints concerning word-initial consonant clusters in children with delayed phonological acquisition was explored. Twelve German-speaking children took part (mean age 5;1). The spontaneous speech of all children was characterized by the regular appearance of the error patterns fronting, e.g., Kuh“cow” /ku:/ →[tu:], or stopping, e.g., Schaf“sheep” /a:f/ →[ta:f], which were inappropriate for their chronological age. The children were asked to produce words (picture naming task, word repetition task) with initial consonant clusters, in which the application of the error patterns would violate phonotactic sequence constraints. For instance, if fronting would apply in /kl-/, e.g., Kleid“dress”, it would be realized as the phontactically illegal consonant cluster /tl-/. The results indicate that phonotactic constraints affect word production in children with delayed phonological developments. Surprisingly, we found that children with fronting produced the critical con...

The present paper, in its essential parts, dates from as early as 1978. It represents the first of a series of studies show how the ingenious Edward Sapir, concerning the much disputed Na-Dene hypothesis, not only correctly classified Tlingit— which now implicitly is accepted even by his critics – but also leaded the right way in the much more complicated case of Haida. On the other hand, the crushing criticism chiefly by R. Levine on Sapir, Hymes, and Pinnow, reveals itself be substantially as well as methodically vastly wrong. Most of the etymologies given by Sapir and/or Pinnow are defensable, new ones could be added. Ostensible separating features can no longer be regarded as such, e. g., s- and l - as first members in initial consonant clusters — according Krauss and Levine they are not even fossilized prefixes — can clearly be isolated as prefixes (comparable with Tlingit s-, c-, l etc.) in a great number of items, e. g. HS q'a harpoon, HK sq'a= stick, e t c . , HK lq'a= many-pointed object (PA *q'a' arrow); HS gal night, lgal black; HK gay blood, sgit to be red, HM geed to be ashamed etc. — The morphology of the noun, principle concern of the present paper, shows many parallels Tlingit-Eyak-Athapaskan. The much more evidential morphology of the verb, together with numerous new etymologies, shall be published at a later date (Das Haida als Na-Dene-Sprache, Komparative Untersuchung uber das Verbum, Ms, 300 pp.). Thus, in the light of these new materials, fundamental elements of Haida in phonemics, morphology and vocabulary prove themselves be genetically related Tlingit-Eyak-Athapaskan.

Confusions in the lipreading of initial consonant clusters were investigated. Responses were obtained from 275 subjects asked to identify by lipreading 32 cluster-vowel nonsense syllables spoken by three different speakers. The results indicated that the consonant clusters were highly confused in lipreading, since they were incorrectly perceived 89% of the time. The clusters were seen most frequently as single consonants followed in frequency by identification as other consonant combinations. The confusions for each stimulus cluster were tested statistically to determine whether their frequency of occurrence might be attributable to chance. The confusions found not to be attributable to chance fell into seven visually contrastive groups. Confusions among sounds produced in similar articulatory positions were prominent.

Thao Triplication Robert Blust Abstract Following a brief review of Thao reduplication, instances of a more involved process termed "triplication" are presented and analyzed. It is concluded that while reduplication has a variety of functions with various lexical categories and may or may not be iconic, triplication functions only with verbs and is necessarily iconic. Triplication serves to increase the degree or intensity of the same semantic dimension invoked by reduplication. Another process termed "serial reduplication" functions only with numerals and involves two quite different semantic contributions to the resulting word. 1. Introduction. Despite the ubiquity of reduplication as a word-formation process in natural languages, triplication appears to be fairly unusual. Moreover, to my knowledge no bona fide case of quadruplication has ever been reported. The purpose of this note is to document the occurrence of productive triplication and at least minimal quadruplication in Thao, a moribund Austronesian language still spoken by about 15 elderly persons in the region of Sun-Moon Lake, central Taiwan. Passing reference to Thao triplication appears in Chang (1998:285), where examples based on ten different stems are given. However, a number of other instances of triplication have since been located in Blust (to appear), as well as a single case of unambiguous quadruplication.1 Before presenting the data that support this claim, a word is in order regarding definitions. When a speaker of Tok Pisin says Em i go go go go go 'He went on and on and on', are we speaking of a morphological process (in this case quintuplication) that is used in building words, or are we instead speaking of a syntactic device for modifying meaning? In this particular case it seems clear that the repetition of the verb has nothing to do with word-building, but is a syntactic means of expressing the continuation of an action. Cases such as this one, however, do suggest that the line between morphology and syntax may sometimes be hard to draw. All but one of the examples of triplication in Thao seem clearly to involve a word-building process. In many cases iteration of the base occurs in conjunction with affixation, and iteration itself may make use of more than one pattern in the [End Page 324] same base. Moreover, some words occur both in reduplicated and in triplicated form, with semantic nuances distinguishing the two. In many cases words formed by multiple iteration cannot be predicted from the general morphological or syntactic resources of the language, and so must be stored as separate lexical entries. In short, then, there is no a priori reason to doubt that the examples that will be given below are genuine instances of triplication, and in one instance, of quadruplication. 2. Thao Reduplication. In order to discuss triplication in Thao it will first be useful to have a concise overview of reduplication patterns in the language. Most of these are summarized in Chang (1998), which provides an analysis in terms of the constraint-based model of Optimality Theory. Chang (1998:279) recognizes 'three productive patterns of reduplication' in Thao: (1) full reduplication, (2) Ca- reduplication, and (3) rightward reduplication. The basic characteristics of each pattern are as follows: 2.1 Full Reduplication. In full reduplication "the base is maximally disyllabic, and if disyllabic, neither syllable may contain a complex onset (*Complex), and the first syllable is always open (No-Coda)." In other words, (1) full reduplication may apply either to monosyllables or to disyllables, but never to longer bases, (2) it may apply to monosyllables with an initial consonant cluster, but never to longer words in which any syllable has a complex onset, and (3) the reduplicated element invariably omits a consonant coda. In the majority of cases, full reduplications signal repetitive or continuative aspect in the verb and intensity in adjectives. Examples include: BASE REDUPLICATED FORM capu ma-capu-capu 'sweep/will sweep and sweep' puzi ma-puzi-puzi 'white/very white' tup kan tu-tup 'follow/follow persistently' canit c-m-ani-canit 'cry/cry often' dauk shi-dau-dauk 'stop/keep still' cpiq cpi-cpiq 'thresh/thresh repeatedly' braq kum-bra-braq 'hole/peck open, as a shell' fanuz fanu-fanuz 'wake up...

Phonetic environment has proven to be one of the most important factors affecting non-native English speakers’ perception of American English /r/ and /l/ [e.g., Lively et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 2076–2087 (1994)]. In the present study native Japanese speakers’ lexical confusion of English /r/ and /l/ are examined through a word translation experiment which employed pairs of English words minimally contrasting /r/ and /l/ in various word positions. Results indicate that English words in which the /r/ or /l/ is located in a perceptually difficult to identify position (e.g., initial consonant cluster: ‘‘branch’’ versus ‘‘blanch’’) are more likely to be mistranslated than those in which the phoneme is located in an easy to identify position (e.g., final singleton: ‘‘compare’’ versus ‘‘compel’’). This finding suggests that errors in phoneme perception and lexical confusion might be related. Pedagogical implications for second language learning will be discussed with respect to results from both learning and retention experiments. [Work supported by TAO, Japan.]

THE RECENT Bulley-Davidson discussion of English initial consonant clusters (ET80, ET81, ET83) brings attention to the need for phonetic rigor and some phonological understanding when describing the sounds and sound patterns of English. Three topics the two writers deal with would benefit from such rigor: /tr/ and /dr/ clusters, the status and function of /j/ in initial clusters before /u/, and the role of syllable structure in the description of consonant clusters.

An approach for the automatic error detection in natural language words without the use of a dictionary of allowed words is described. Automatically generated tables, which describe allowed syllables and syllable sequences, are used instead. These, on the other hand, are based on allowed initial and terminal consonant and vowel clusters. Therefore, an arbitrary string or erroneous word is tested whether it resembles a natural language word applying the above sequence tables.

This is the second volume of papers on sign-based linguistics to emerge from Columbia School linguistics conferences. One set of articles offers semantic analyses of grammatical features of specific languages: English full-verb inversion; Serbo-Croatian deictic pronouns; English auxiliary do; Italian pronouns egli and lui; the Celtic-influenced use of on (e.g., ‘he played a trick on me’); a monosemic analysis of the English verb break. A second set deals with general theoretical issues: a solution to the problem that noun class markers (e.g. Swahili) pose for sign-based linguistics; the appropriateness of statistical tests of significance in text-based analysis; the word or the morpheme as the locus of paradigmatic inflectional change; the radical consequences of Saussure’s anti-nomenclaturism for syntactic analysis; the future of ‘minimalist linguistics’ in a maximalist world. A third set explains phonotactic patterning in terms of ease of articulation: aspirated and unaspirated stop consonants in Urdu; initial consonant clusters in more than two dozen languages. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical points of each article and their relation to the Columbia School framework. The collection is relevant to cognitive semanticists and functionalists as well as those working in the sign-based Jakobsonian and Guillaumist frameworks.

Word-Form Encoding in Mandarin Chinese as Assessed by the Implicit Priming Task

Pavlenko argues that contemporary models of the bilingual lexicon (e.g., Kroll & De Groot, 1997) confuse word meanings and concepts. A new approach to concepts in bilingual memory is advocated in which meanings and concepts have separate representations. ‘‘The evidence for a distinction between word meanings and concepts comes from the study of aphasia: it has been demonstrated that global and paroxysmal aphasics exhibit a complete loss of language (lack of production and comprehension) in the presence of self-regulated and communicative behavior, based on wellcontrolled non-linguistic conceptual representations’’. For example, the patients may be able to tell the difference between a cat and a dog but producing or understanding the words ‘‘cat’’ and ‘‘dog’’ is impossible. According to Pavlenko, such findings suggest that word meanings and concepts have separate representations in the brain (cf. Paradis, 1997). In this commentary, I argue that the assumption of separate representations for meanings and concepts is not required by the aphasia data ‐ in fact, the standard account of global aphasia and anomia does not make this distinction (e.g., Caplan, 1992). Furthermore, the findings on bilingual performance do not require the separation either. Instead, a single, conceptual level suffices and provides an even better account of the available evidence. I lay out my arguments using the WEAVER++ model of word production (Roelofs, 1992, 1993; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999a) but they hold for most ‘‘one-level’’ models in the literature. WEAVER++ is a model for monolingual word production in which conceptual representations also code word meanings. So, if Pavlenko is right, the model should have great difficulty accounting for the patient data and it should be hard to extend the model to bilingual production. In the model, a distinction is made between conceptual preparation, lemma retrieval, and word-form encoding. During conceptual preparation, a speaker decides on the conceptual information to be verbally expressed, called the ‘‘message’’ concepts. In lemma retrieval, a message concept is used to retrieve a lemma from memory, which is a representation of the syntactic properties of a word, crucial for its use in sentences. For example, an English verb lemma specifies the word’s syntactic class and what kind of complements the word takes. A verb lemma also contains morphosyntactic slots for the specification of tense, aspect, mood, person, and number. The slots are given values using information from the message or are set by agreement. So, it is certainly not the case that a one-level model ‘‘narrows the scope of investigation to lexicalized concepts only, making it impossible to entertain any other kind, such as grammaticized concepts (encoded morphosyntactically)’’ as claimed by Pavlenko. A noun lemma specifies the syntactic class, has a number slot (for count nouns), and, for languages like Dutch, French, and German, specifies the grammatical gender. Lemma retrieval makes these properties available for syntactic encoding processes. In word-form encoding, the lemma information and the morphosyntactic slot values are used to retrieve the appropriate form properties from memory in order to construct an articulatory program. Information about words is represented in a network

This paper attempts to reconstruct the onset of the word for ‘egg’ in Old Chinese (OC). Based solely on Middle Chinese (MC), *rˤonʔ would be the default OC reconstruction. However, philological evidence such as a phonetic relationship (also called Xiéshēng connections), annotations, and variant characters show the relationship between the word for ‘egg’ and words with the velar onset in MC. (Interestingly, most of them belong to the so-called Division-II rhyme in MC.) In addition, comparative data from Proto-Min (*lh-), Proto-Hmong-Mien (*qr-), and Proto-Tai (*qr-) indicate the possibility of reconstructing the consonant cluster *k.rˤ- for the onset of the word for ‘egg’. In § 4, I shall provide some additional evidence from the excavated documents, such as oracle bone inscriptions 甲骨文, Chǔ bamboo slips 楚簡, and Qín bamboo slips 秦簡. In Chǔ bamboo slips, the characters having 䜌 luán as a phonetic element represent the words having onset *k-, such as 關 guān, 卷 juǎn, and 宦 huàn (seen in Ān Dà Jiǎn 安大簡, which is also categorized as Chǔ bamboo slips 楚簡). Furthermore, the character luán, which has 䜌 luán as an additional phonetic element, represents the word for ‘egg’ on Qín bamboo slips 秦簡. As noted above, the character 䜌 luán can represent the words having onset *k-. This all constitutes evidence supporting the reconstruction of the word for ‘egg’ with the initial consonant cluster *k.rˤ- in OC, confirming the reconstruction of T’ung-ho Tung (1944) and Baxter & Sagart (2014).

Reviewed by: The roots of Old Chinese by Laurent Sagart Gonzalo Rubio The roots of Old Chinese. By Laurent Sagart. (Current issues in linguistic theory 184.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. xi, 255. One of the most important consequences of the last 80 years of research in Old Chinese (OC) concerns the discovery of the morphology of what was regarded as the isolating language par excellence. Reconstructing final consonantal clusters in codas (which carried the rhymes in the major corpus of OC, the poems of the Shījīng) and initial clusters shed light not only on the complex phonotactics of OC but also on the elements of derivational morphology which were responsible for the formation of semantically related words as well as personal pronouns. The main steps in this unveiling process were marked by the works of Bernhard Karlgren (with their culmination in Grammata serica recensa, Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1964), Edwin G. Pulleyblank (Middle Chinese, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1984), and William H. Baxter (A handbook of Old Chinese phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992). Whereas all these efforts were focused on phonology and, therefore, any morphological findings were a rather accidental byproduct, Sagart vindicates the figure of Henri Maspero, whose work on OC morphology would have probably reached groundbreaking conclusions if he had not died a victim of the Nazi horror in Buchenwald in March 1945. In his 1934 article (Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 5.1–112), Karlgren dealt with several morphological alternations within word families, but he did not suggest that affixes were responsible for such alternations. However, in a 1930 article (Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique 23.313–27), Maspero pointed to the existence and productivity of affixes in OC. Ten years earlier, he had also pioneered the research concerning initial consonantal clusters in OC (Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 20.1–124). S summarizes these and other contributions by Maspero (2–4), placing them in the context of the later developments in the reconstruction of OC and the progressive introduction of the concept of affixation as an explanation for what appear as derivational elements employed in both general Wortbildung and in the pronominal system. One of S’s most valuable assets lies in the use of comparative material from other Sino-Tibetan languages which provide further support for some of the proposals made in this book. After a very informative introduction (1–12), the first half of this book deals with the phonological and morphological aspects of the so-called ‘word families’. S first explains the nature of OC words and roots (13–23) together with their root segmentals and the syllabic structure of OC (24–62). Diverse chapters devoted to several prefixes follow: *s- (63–73), used to derive causative, denominative, directive, and perhaps inchoative verbs, as well as to derive nouns from verbs; *N- (74–78)—instead of the voiced laryngeal *ɦ- as Pulleyblank and Baxter reconstruct—a nasal prefix which assimilates its articulation point to the following consonant and which generates intransitive verbs out of transitive ones; *m- (79–86), which probably marks the controlled or volitional nature of the action indicated with a verb; *p- (87–89), whose function remains obscure; *t- (90–97), deriving mostly intransitive and stative verbs from other verbs, as well as generally uncountable nouns; *k- (98–107), which seems to mark an iterative Aktionsart in many instances; *q- (108–9); and voiced stop prefixes (110). The reconstruction of infixes in OC is especially interesting for the alleged implications of traditional language types. OC exhibited at least one infix (111–20), *-r-, marking mostly repetitive action in verbs, dual or plural in nouns, and intensive in adjectives. This infix survives in the -l- of some modern Chinese dialects (e.g. Western Mı̌n Jiànōu kau8-lau8 ‘to stir’ from kau8). The study of prefixes and infixes is followed by chapters on initial clusters (121–30), suffixes (131–36), reduplication and compounding (137–38), and issues of etymology (139–141). The second part of the book is devoted to the study of different semantic fields and grammatical...

Many aspects of human performance require producing sequences of items in serial order. The current study takes a multiple-case approach to investigate whether the system responsible for serial order is shared across cognitive domains, focusing on working memory (WM) and word production. Serial order performance in three individuals with post-stroke language and verbal WM disorders (hereafter persons with aphasia, PWAs) were assessed using recognition and recall tasks for verbal and visuospatial WM, as well as error analyses in spoken and written production tasks to assess whether there was a tendency to produce the correct phonemes/letters in the wrong order. One PWA exhibited domain-specific serial order deficits in verbal and visuospatial WM. The PWA with verbal serial order WM deficit made more serial order errors than expected by chance in both repetition and writing-to-dictation tasks, whereas the other two PWAs showed no serial order deficits in verbal WM and production tasks. These findings suggest separable serial order systems for verbal and visuospatial WM and a shared system for serial order processing in verbal WM and word production. Implications for the domain-generality of WM, its connection to language production, and serial order processing across cognitive functionssc are discussed.

We examine how well categorical and probabilistic phonotactic learning models extract grammars which predict Polish speakers' acceptability judgments of words with varied initial consonant clusters. Polish is an especially interesting language to look at because of its rich inventory of sonority-sequencing defying consonant clusters, often as a result of yer-deletion. In line with results by Gorman (2013) and Durvasula (2020), we find that the categorical baselines considered here generally outperformed the Hayes and Wilson's (2008) maximum-entropy based phonotactic learner. We conclude that gradient acceptability judgments do not provide unambiguous evidence for gradient, probabilistic grammars.

This study provides an acoustic analysis of the realization of the surface word-initial obstruent clusters that resulted from the deletion of short vowels in Najdi Arabic. While past studies discussed the syllable structure of Najdi Arabic and affirmed the permissibility of initial consonant clusters, most of these studies lack acoustic analyses that attest the occurrence of initial consonant clusters and left much uncertainty about the allowed and disallowed segments in the clusters. The aim of the present research is to address this gap in the literature by conducting an acoustic analysis that examined the types and patterns of the allowed obstruent clusters in the Najdi Arabic dialect. Two methods were implemented to collect the data: informal interview and a reading task. The stimuli represented the four types of obstruent clusters: fricative-fricative, fricative-plosive, plosive-fricative, and plosive-plosive. Fourteen native Najdi Arabic speakers (7 males, 7 females) were recruited. The findings of this study affirm the presence of the four types of the obstruent clusters and provide a description of their patterns in Najdi Arabic. This finding enhances our understanding of the phonology of Najdi Arabic and contributes to the wide-ranging context of Arabic dialectology with regards to phonotactics and syllable structure.