We argue that local languages, coupled with modern pedagogy and technology, are necessary, though not sufficient, ingredients for universal access to quality education. Our case study is Haiti, where French is the primary language of school instruction, though it is spoken by only a small percentage of the population, while Haitian Creole (aka ‘Kreyòl’), the language fluently spoken by all Haitians in Haiti, is mostly excluded from the formal discourse and written documents that create and transmit knowledge (and power) in schools, courts, state offices, and so forth. We first describe the historical, political, linguistic, and sociocultural backgrounds to such impediments to quality education in Haiti. Then we present and analyze data that begin to answer these two questions: (i) What does change look like in complex postcolonial contexts, especially change in educators’ attitudes toward the use of stigmatized languages (such as Kreyòl) in formal education? (ii) How can local languages such as Kreyòl serve to enhance the promotion and dissemination of modern pedagogy and technology for STEM education, and vice versa—namely, how can STEM education, in turn, serve to enhance the promotion of stigmatized languages such as Kreyòl?

This article examines the distribution of gender in arguments in example sentences in contemporary linguistics publications. Prior studies have shown that example sentences in syntax textbooks systematically underrepresent women and perpetuate gender stereotypes (Macaulay & Brice 1994, 1997, Pabst et al. 2018). Here we examine example sentences in articles published over the past twenty years in Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and Natural Language & Linguistic Theory and find striking similarities to this prior work. Among our findings, we show a stark imbalance of male (N = 12,117) to female (N = 5,571) arguments, where male-gendered arguments are more likely to be subjects, and female-gendered arguments nonsubjects. We show that female-gendered arguments are more likely to be referred to using a kinship term, to exhibit positive emotions, and to be the object of affection, whereas male-gendered arguments are more likely to have occupations, to exhibit negative emotions, and to perpetrate violence. We show that this pattern has remained stable, with little change, over the course of the twenty years that we examine, leading up to the present day. We conclude with a brief discussion of possible remedies and suggestions for improvement.

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven could have provided a stronger argument for their conclusion, which postulated that innate universal-grammar-specified knowledge does not simplify the language learning task, had they not paid so much attention to the Chomskyan paradigm. I argue that poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments do not take into account that children are opportunistic learners employing multiple strategies, that they do not accomplish individual tasks sequentially but acquire (partial) knowledge about multiple domains simultaneously, and that they do not acquire perfect knowledge of language. Furthermore, work in formal linguistics suggests that the Chomskyan paradigm is internally incoherent and that the formalism of the Chomskyan framework lacks mathematical precision, making it difficult to evaluate its predictions. Given that linguistics ought to provide crucial input for language acquisition research, more attention needs to be paid to non-Chomskyan work in linguistics.

This article reports on the successful implementation of the DISCOVERY METHOD in an undergraduate Generative Syntax course. Rather than reading textbooks on syntactic analysis and doing exercises to apply what was read, students embark on a nine-stage learning cycle consisting of interactive, guided, and independent work. They engage with problem sets to build their own analyses of syntactic phenomena step by step. This method—meant to resemble the work of real-life scientists—allows students to hypothesize, experiment, and build knowledge from trial and error (Kolb 1984, Prince 2004). To measure the effectiveness of our pedagogy, we analyzed course evaluations submitted from 2012 to the present. Learner feedback shows that they find the assignments and activities helpful, that the course challenges them to think and learn, and that they consider the weekly write-ups demanding, yet highly beneficial for their learning.

In this article, we argue that the current linguistic and educational policies affecting school-age US children whose native language is American Sign Language (ASL) should be changed. Concretely, we demonstrate that ASL-English bilinguals should be eligible for classification as English Learners (EL). While this identification should remain optional in order to be responsive to individual differences and preferences, we argue that identification can result in increased educational services and access to appropriately targeted instructional support. We offer concrete programmatic and curricular solutions and articulate other consequences affecting various fields, including language policy.

This paper examines the role of phonetic cues to postnasal laryngeal contrasts, language-specific differences in the use of these cues, and the phonetic naturalness of the different cues. While many studies have shown that long stop closure duration is a well-established cue to voicelessness in the postnasal context (see, e.g., Colm & Riehl 2012, who claim this to be a universal property), the present study focusses on the role of aspiration noise in maintaining a voicing contrast in the postnasal environment. It provides experimental data from the Bantu language Tumbuka to illustrate that aspiration noise can preserve a postnasal laryngeal contrast even when stop closure duration is short. Though typologically less common, we show that the use of aspiration as a cue is also phonetically motivated. Furthermore, we show that such phonetic motivation should not be directly incorporated into phonology (e.g., as markedness constraints in OT). Instead, we employ the BiPhon model (Boersma 2007), which allows for a strict distinction between the modules of phonetics and phonology, and which formalizes the mapping of phonetic cues onto phonological representations via cue constraints, avoiding the problem of phonetic determinism.

This research report discusses a set of Indonesian predicates exemplified by mau ‘want’ and suka ‘like’. I demonstrate with several diagnostics that these morphemes occur as either auxiliary or verb, and note that the availability of the auxiliary reading has been overlooked in recent literature. Since mau and suka belong to the set of so-called crossed control predicates, the lexical ambiguity discussed here has implications for potential analyses of crossed control sentences. I suggest that the auxiliary reading for mau, suka, and other predicates must be carefully ruled out before the existence of a crossed reading can be established.

Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers' first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded BOTH event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in Relational Encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a Weakly Hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders.

Nonadjacent dependencies are an important part of the structure of language. While the majority of syntactic and phonological processes occur at a local domain, there are several processes that appear to apply at a distance, posing a challenge for theories of linguistic structure. This article addresses one of the most common nonadjacent phenomena in phonology: transparent vowels in vowel harmony. Vowel harmony occurs when adjacent vowels are required to share the same phonological feature value (e.g. V+f C V+f). However, transparent vowels create a second-order nonadjacent pattern because agreement between two vowels can ‘skip’ the transparent neutral vowel in addition to consonants (e.g. V+f C VlF C V+f). Adults are shown to display initial learning biases against second-order nonadjacency in experiments that use an artificial grammar learning paradigm. Experiments 1-3 show that adult learners fail to learn the second-order long-distance dependency created by the transparent vowel (as compared to a control condition). In experiments 4-5, training in terms of overall exposure as well as the frequency of relevant transparent items was increased. With adequate exposure, learners reliably generalize to novel words containing transparent vowels. The experiments suggest that learners are sensitive to the structure of phonological representations, even when learning occurs at a relatively rapid pace.

In this study we provide a comprehensive phonological and morphological overview of the complex tense-aspect-mood (TAM) system of Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. Our emphasis is on the competing inflectional tonal melodies that are assigned to the verb stem. These melodies are determined not only by the multiple past and future tenses, perfective vs. progressive aspect, and indicative vs. imperative, subjunctive, and conditional moods, but also affirmative vs. negative and “conjoint” (CJ) vs. “disjoint” (DJ) verbal marking, which we show to be more thoroughgoing than the better known cases in Eastern and Southern Bantu. The paper concludes with a ranking of the six assigned tonal melodies and fourteen appendices providing all of the relevant tonal paradigms.

We introduce a pedagogical initiative, which we call COLLABORATIVE ACTIVE LEARNING RESEARCH-BASED EDUCATION (CARE), for incorporating authentic research into the undergraduate classroom. CARE is founded on a broad base of pedagogical scholarship, which we summarize. We propose that there are numerous benefits to engaging students in research at the undergraduate level in the phonetics/phonology classroom, provided that the integration of research is done in a pedagogically sound manner. We describe an initiative carried out in the Spring 2019 semester, in which students in combined phonetics/phonology classes carried out acoustic and ultrasound studies of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation while simultaneously investigating vowel harmony from a phonological perspective. We propose that the CARE approach to developing a course-based undergraduate research experience is one way to integrate laboratory phonology into the undergraduate curriculum.