This study investigates how listeners associate acoustically different vowels with a single linguistic vowel quality. Listeners were asked to identify vowel sounds as /æ/ or /ʌ/ and to indicate the size of the speaker that produced them. Results indicate that perceived vowel quality trades off with the perception of speaker size: different vowels can sound the same, and the same vowel can sound different when a different speaker is perceived. These findings suggest that vowel normalization is broadly similar to perceptual constancy in other domains, and that social, indexical, and linguistic information play an important role in determining even the most fundamental units of linguistic representation.

Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of CATEGORY CLUSTERING, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position (‘paradigmatic alignment’; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform (‘featural coherence’; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers' production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential ordering. We then show in a typological study that the same principle also shapes the evolution of morphological structure: although exceptions are attested, paradigms are much more likely to obey rather than to violate the principle. Category clustering is therefore a good candidate for a universal force shaping the structure and use of language, potentially due to benefits in processing and learning.

Final obstruent devoicing is common in the world's languages and constitutes a clear case of parallel phonological evolution. Final obstruent voicing, in contrast, is claimed to be rare or nonexistent. Two distinct theoretical approaches crystalize around obstruent voicing patterns. Traditional markedness accounts view these sound patterns as consequences of universal markedness constraints prohibiting voicing, or favoring voicelessness, in final position, and predict that final obstruent voicing does not exist. In contrast, phonetic-historical accounts explain skewed patterns of voicing in terms of common phonetically based devoicing tendencies, allowing for rare cases of final obstruent voicing under special conditions. In this article, phonetic and phonological evidence is offered for final obstruent voicing in Lakota, an indigenous Siouan language of the Great Plains of North America. In Lakota, oral stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ are regularly pronounced as [b], [l], and [ɡ] in word- and syllable-final position when phrase-final devoicing and preobstruent devoicing do not occur.

Earlier research has found that phonological markedness constraints (for example, against stress clash or sibilant sequences) statistically influence speakers' choices between particular syntactic constructions and between synonymous words. In this study, we test phonological constraints not just in particular cases, but across the board. We employ a novel method that statistically models the distribution of word bigrams (consecutive two-word sequences) and how this distribution is influenced by phonological constraints. Our study of multiple corpora indicates that several phonological constraints do indeed play a statistically significant role in English sentence formation. We also show that by examining particular subsets of the corpora we can diagnose the mechanisms whereby phonologically marked sequences come to be underrepresented. We conclude by discussing modes of grammatical organization compatible with our findings.

This work focuses on explaining both grammatical universals of word order and quantitative word-order preferences in usage by means of a simple efficiency principle: dependency locality. In its simplest form, dependency locality holds that words linked in a syntactic dependency (any head–dependent relationship) should be close in linear order. We give large-scale corpus evidence that dependency locality predicts word order in both grammar and usage, beyond what would be expected from independently motivated principles, and demonstrate a means for dissociating grammar and usage in corpus studies. Finally, we discuss previously undocumented variation in dependency length and how it correlates with other linguistic features such as head direction, providing a rich set of explananda for future linguistic theories.

Studies of variable lenition patterns converge on two phonetic properties as characteristic of lenition: reduced duration and increased intensity. However, the causal precedence of the two factors remains unclear. We focus on the causal structure of variable lenition. Study 1 examines the relationship between three correlates of lenition—speech rate, stress, and low information content—and their effect on reduced duration and increased intensity. We find that though increased intensity is more prototypically viewed as the core aspect of lenition, the effect of the three correlates on intensity is mediated by duration. Study 2 shows that all frequent lenition processes in the Buckeye corpus involve durational reduction. The contribution of this article is a proposal with a fairly simple principle, with few auxiliary assumptions: reduced duration precedes increased intensity in variable lenition.

Currently, linguistics (LING) courses are underrepresented in general education at most US universities. As general education requirements undergo reform in higher education, the field of linguistics has an opportunity to assume a more central role. We argue that linguistics courses aligned with the key competencies of critical thinking, information literacy, and inquiry and analysis are well positioned to augment general education curricula, particularly at institutions that utilize common student learning objectives. An innovative The Language of Now core course and its signature assignment, a learner-centered research project on the use of the text-messaging discourse marker lol, illustrate how the methods used in linguistic inquiry are amenable to a range of standards that support general education goals.

Computational probabilistic modeling is increasingly popular in linguistics, but its relationship with linguistic theory is ambivalent. We argue here for the potential benefit of theory-driven statistical modeling, based on a case study situated at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Using data from a novel experiment, we employ Bayesian model comparison to evaluate the predictive adequacy of four models that differ in the extent to and manner in which grammatically generated candidate readings are taken into account in four probabilistic pragmatic models of utterance and interpretation choice. The data provide strong evidence for the idea that the full range of potential readings made available by recently popular grammatical approaches to scalar-implicature computation might be needed, and that classical Gricean reasoning may help manage the manifold ambiguity introduced by grammatical approaches to these. The case study thereby shows a way of bridging linguistic theory and empirical data with the help of probabilistic pragmatic modeling as a linking function.

The postulation of segmental units as real components of phonological competence is controversial, despite their widespread acceptance. One aspect of the controversy concerns the similarities between the units of segmental phonology and those of alphabetic writing: the historically and culturally contingent fact that Western society uses alphabetic writing may explain the primacy of segments in modern phonology. The ancient Indian tradition of phonological analysis has been claimed to exemplify a nonsegmental approach, reflecting their lack of influence from alphabetic writing. I show that the ancient Indian phonological tradition was fundamentally segmental, despite lacking any alphabetic influence. In ancient India, segmental units were identified as the basic units of analysis on the basis of purely linguistic considerations.