This study investigates whether alternation learning is facilitated by a matching phonotactic generalization. In a series of artificial grammar learning experiments, English learners were trained on artificial languages evincing categorical vowel harmony alternations across morpheme boundaries. These languages differed in the degree of harmony within stems (disharmonic, semi-harmonic, and harmonic), and thus the degree of phonotactic support for the alternation. Results indicate that alternation learning was best when supported by matching stem phonotactics (harmonic language; experiment 1). Learners, however, were reluctant to extend a learned phonotactic constraint to novel unseen alternations (experiments 2 and 3). Taken together, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that alternation learning is facilitated by a matching static phonotactic generalization, but that learners are conservative in positing alternations in the absence of overt evidence for them.

Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language combining Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan) with varieties of English and/or Kriol that has emerged within approximately the last thirty-five years, shows radical restructuring of the verbal auxiliary system, including modal categories that differ from those in the source languages. The structure of Light Warlpiri overall is that of a mixed language, in that most verbs and some verbal morphology are drawn from English and/or Kriol, and most nominal morphology is from Warlpiri. Nouns are drawn from both Warlpiri-lexicon and English-lexicon sources. The restructuring of the auxiliary system draws selectively on elements from Warlpiri and several varieties and styles of English and/or Kriol, combined in such a way as to produce novel constructions. It may be that when multiple sources provide input to a rapidly emerging new system, innovative categories are likely to appear.

Because of restrictions on in-person research due to COVID-19, researchers are now relying on remotely recorded data to a much greater extent than in the past. Given the change in methodology, it is important to know how remote recording might affect acoustic measurements, either because of different recording devices used by participants and consultants or because of the software used to make recordings. This study investigates audio signal fidelity across different inperson recording equipment and remote recording software when compared to solid-state digital audio. We show that equipment choice and software can have a large effect on acoustic measurements, including those of frequency, duration, and noise. The issues do not just reflect decreased reliability; some measurements are systematically shifted in particular recording conditions. These results show the importance of carefully considering and documenting equipment choices, particularly for crosslinguistic or cross-speaker comparisons. We close with a framework for researchers to use in deciding what types of recording may be most appropriate.

How and why speakers differ in the phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts, and the relationship of this ‘structured heterogeneity’ to language change, has been a key focus over fifty years of variationist sociolinguistics. In phonetics, interest has recently grown in uncovering ‘structured variability’—how speakers can differ greatly in phonetic realization in nonrandom ways—as part of the long-standing goal of understanding variability in speech. The English stop voicing contrast, which combines extensive phonetic variability with phonological stability, provides an ideal setting for an approach to understanding structured variation in the sounds of a community's language that illuminates both synchrony and diachrony. This article examines the voicing contrast in a vernacular dialect (Glasgow Scots) in spontaneous speech, focusing on individual speaker variability within and across cues, including over time. Speakers differ greatly in the use of each of three phonetic cues to the contrast, while reliably using each one to differentiate voiced and voiceless stops. Interspeaker variability is highly structured: speakers lie along a continuum of use of each cue, as well as correlated use of two cues—voice onset time and closure voicing—along a single axis. Diachronic change occurs along this axis, toward a more aspiration-based and less voicing-based phonetic realization of the contrast, suggesting an important connection between synchronic and diachronic speaker variation.

This article presents a descriptive and theoretical framework for the analysis of prosodic systems that have emerged from contact between African tone and European intonation-only languages. A comparative study of the prosodic systems of two Romance contact varieties, Central African French and Equatorial Guinean Spanish, shows that they feature two-tone systems, fixed word-tone patterns, tonal minimal pairs, the arbitrary assignment of tone in function words, and tonal processes. Evidence from further contact varieties and creole languages shows that similar systems evolved in other Afro-European contact ecologies. We conclude that tone is imposed by default on contact varieties and creoles that take shape in ecologies characterized by source-language agentivity in tone languages. In doing so, we argue against claims that tone necessarily cedes to stress during language contact and creolization. Instead, contact varieties and creoles partake just like other languages in the convergence processes that lead to the areal clustering of prosodic systems.

Effects of word frequency on spoken word duration are well documented and have long informed theories of the mental lexicon. In this study, we discuss the two theoretical constructs, ‘frequency’ and ‘word’, that are implicated by the notion of lexical frequency, in light of recent models of the lexicon that do not contain stable, discrete lexical representations, and in which lexical frequency therefore has no place. We compare two approaches (localist spreading-activation vs. discriminative learning (DL) models integrating distributional semantics) by assessing regression models of spoken word duration of English homophones grounded in each. We further show that the relationship between a homophone's form and its semantics is predictive of its duration, consistent with predictions of the DL-based model.

Previous studies concluded that despite the parser's eagerness to resolve filler-gap dependencies, in island configurations it prefers to posit late grammatical gaps over early ungrammatical ones. This study investigates the possibility of resolving filler-gap dependencies inside Hebrew islands. We investigated the acceptability of resumptive pronouns (RPs) in two islands and the sensitivity of on-line dependency formation to the status of those RPs. Results revealed a filled-gap effect inside the island that allows RPs but not inside the one that prohibits them. This suggests that active dependency formation can proceed inside islands, and that when processing dependencies with islands, the Hebrew parser prefers an early RP over a later gap.

This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as speech and hearing sciences, composition and literacy studies, education, and critical interdisciplinary race studies. The lack of comprehensive and up-to-date theoretical, analytical, and political understandings of race within linguistics not only weakens research by erasing, marginalizing, and misrepresenting racially minoritized groups, but it also diminishes the impact of the entire field by devaluing and excluding the intellectual contributions of researchers of color, whose work on this topic is rarely welcome within linguistics departments. The article therefore argues for a rethinking of both linguistic scholarship and linguistics as a discipline in more racially inclusive and socially just terms.

Jeoung (2020) argues that certain predicates in Indonesian are categorially ambiguous between auxiliaries and lexical verbs. Moreover, she claims that the auxiliary reading has been overlooked in analyses of so-called crossed control in Indonesian. As we show in this reply, however, the auxiliary reading is in fact independent of crossed control.

Pater's (2019) target article proposes that neural networks will provide theories of learning that generative grammar lacks. We argue that his enthusiasm is premature since the biases of neural networks are largely unknown, and he disregards decades of work on machine learning and learnability. Learning biases form a two-way street: all learners have biases, and those biases constrain the space of learnable grammars in mathematically measurable ways. Analytical methods from the related fields of computational learning theory and grammatical inference allow one to study language learning, neural networks, and linguistics at an appropriate level of abstraction. The only way to satisfy our hunger and to make progress on the science of language learning is to confront these core issues directly.