This is the first comparative analysis of prosody in deaf, native-signing children (ages 5;0-8;5) and adults whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL). The goals of this study are to describe the distribution of prosodic cues during acquisition, to determine which cues across age groups are most predictive in determining clausal and prosodic boundaries, and to ascertain how much isomorphy there is in ASL between syntactic and prosodic units. The results show that all cues are acquired compositionally, and that the prosodic patterns in child and adult ASL signers exhibit important differences regarding specific cues; however, in all groups the manual cues are more predictive of prosodic boundaries than nonmanual markers. This is evidence for a division of labor between the cues that are produced to mark constituents and those that contribute to semantic and pragmatic meaning. There is also more isomorphy in adults than in children, so these results add to the debates about isomorphy, suggesting that while there is clear autonomy between prosody and syntax, productions exhibiting nonisomorphy are relatively rare overall.

Basing his argumentation on an analysis of condition C effects, Bruening (2014) proposes to replace the familiar notion of c-command underlying dependency relations with a precede-and-command condition, which defines dependency relations as precedence relations within a local domain (phase). In this reply I argue that condition C effects cannot be used to show the relevance of phases for the definition of syntactic dependency, and I question the conceptual necessity of the notion phase as currently defined.

This article is an analysis of the claim that a universal ban on certain (‘anti-markedness’) grammars is necessary in order to explain their nonoccurrence in the languages of the world. Such a claim is based on the following assumptions: that phonological typology shows a highly asymmetric distribution, and that such a distribution cannot possibly arise ‘naturally’—that is, without a universal grammar-based restriction of the learner’s hypothesis space. Attempting to test this claim reveals a number of open issues in linguistic theory. In the first place, there exist critical aspects of synchronic theory that are not specified explicitly enough to implement computationally. Second, there remain many aspects of linguistic competence, language acquisition, sound change, and even typology that are still unknown. It is not currently possible, therefore, to reach a definitive conclusion about the necessity, or lack thereof, of an innate substantive grammar module. This article thus serves two main functions: acting both as a pointer to the areas of phonological theory that require further development, especially at the overlap between traditionally separate subdomains, and as a template for the type of argumentation required to defend or attack claims about phonological universals.

A certain class of English adjectives known as a-adjectives resist appearing attributively as prenominal modifiers (e.g. ??the afraid boy, ??the asleep man). Boyd & Goldberg 2011 had offered experimental evidence suggesting that the dispreference is learnable on the basis of categorization and STATISTICAL PREEMPTION: repeatedly witnessing predicative formulations in contexts in which the attributive form would otherwise be appropriate. The present reply addresses Yang's (2015) counterproposal for how a-adjectives are learned and his instructive critique of statistical preemption. The counterproposal is that children receive evidence that a-adjectives behave like locative particles in occurring with certain adverbs such as far and right. However, in an analysis of the 450-million-word COCA corpus, the suggested adverbial evidence is virtually nonexistent (e.g. *far alive, * straight afraid). In fact, these adverbs occur much more frequently with typical adjectives (e.g. far greater, straight alphabetical). Furthermore, relating a-adjectives to locative particles does not provide evidence of the restriction, because locative particles themselves can appear as prenominal modifiers (the down payment, the outside world). The critique of statistical preemption is based on a 4.3-million-word corpus analysis of child-directed speech that suggests that children cannot amass the requisite evidence before they are three years old. While we clarify which sorts of data are relevant to statistical preemption, we concur that the required data is relatively sparsely represented in the input. In fact, recent evidence suggests that children are not actually cognizant of the restriction until they are roughly ten years old, an indication that input of an order of magnitude more than 4.3 million words may be required. We conclude that a combination of categorization and statistical preemption is consistent with the available evidence of how the restriction on a-adjectives is learned.

An article published in Language (Sproat 2014a) questions our findings on the Indus script and Pictish symbols published in the journals Science (Rao et al. 2009a), PNAS (Rao et al. 2009b), IEEE Computer (Rao 2010), and the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Lee et al. 2010a,b). Sproat's article does not accurately present our methods and findings, and its conclusions are based on what appears to be a misunderstanding of our proposed approach. For example, the article's results on entropic measures seem to favor, rather than contradict, the inductive hypothesis that the Indus script may represent writing. The article selects results to draw a particular set of conclusions and convey a specific viewpoint. In light of these issues, we stand by our original findings.