In the English lexicon, laryngeal alternations in the plural (e.g. leaf ~ leaves) impact monosyllables more than finally stressed polysyllables. This is the opposite of what happens typologically, and would thereby run contrary to the predictions of initial-syllable faithfulness. Despite the lexical pattern, in a wug test we found monosyllables to be impacted no more than finally stressed polysyllables were—a ‘surfeit of the stimulus’ effect, in which speakers fail to learn a statistical generalization present in the lexicon. We present two artificial-grammar experiments in which English speakers indeed manifest a universal bias for protecting monosyllables, and initial syllables more generally. The conclusion, therefore, is that speakers can exhibit spontaneous learning that goes directly against the evidence offered by the ambient language, a result we attribute to formal and substantive biases in phonological acquisition.

A variety of mechanisms have been proposed in sociolinguistics for the propagation of an innovation through the speech community. The complexity of social systems makes it difficult to evaluate the different mechanisms empirically. We use the four-way typology of mechanisms proposed by Baxter and colleagues (2009), and define them mathematically in such a way that the effects of different mechanisms in the trajectory of a change can be modeled. The model suggests that the widely observed empirical pattern of an S-curve temporal trajectory of change can be captured only if the mechanisms for propagation include replicator selection, that is, differential weighting of the competing variants in a change, except under highly specialized circumstances that probably do not hold in speech communities in general.

Same-except is a fundamental, domain-general cognitive relation in which entities in proximity to one another are judged to be the Same, Except for some part or property where they differ. This relation can be attested in nonlinguistic modalities such as vision, audition, and taste, and it plays an important role in nonlinguistic categorization. We show that this relation is expressed linguistically by means of a wide range of devices, including (a) lexical expressions such as same and except, (b) contrastive stress, (c) anaphora (e.g. definite and indefinite NP anaphora and VP anaphora), (d) ellipsis (e.g. bare argument ellipsis, sluicing, gapping, and VP ellipsis), and (e) fixed expressions such as vice versa and that goes for. Our approach thereby unifies the semantics of all of these phenomena under a common account that is based on a domain-general cognitive principle. We compare our approach with accounts of ellipsis based on syntactic copying or deletion, showing that although both approaches have their difficulties, the challenges to the copying/deletion approach are more severe.

This article compares an extensive collection of English loanwords into Korean with a corpus of perceptual responses to English productions by Korean students of English in Korea. The analysis selects ten obstruents situated in four prosodic contexts: initial, final, and pre- and poststress intervocalic positions. Analyses compare the mapping of the obstruents onto Korean categories in the two databases, finding a strong logistic relationship between them, which indicates a process of loanword adaptation as a regularization of the cross-language perception patterns. This conclusion is also supported by differences in the maps across the prosodic positions, wherein loanword differences are correlated with perceptual differences, and by the fact that loanword adaptations are more variable for consonants that do not have a very robust perceptual map. The data, however, also exhibit exceptional cases that apparently indicate effects of a historical lexicalization of individual forms, as well as of an explicit sociocultural standard. Thus, loanword adaptation in this case, though largely indicative of a perceptual base, is more than just synchronic perception.

The goal of this discussion note is to argue that the complex facts of hybrid agreement in Serbo-Croatian can and should be accounted for by assuming that only two sets of features are relevant to agreement: a syntactic set and a semantic set. This is in opposition to existing proposals that claim that two distinct sets of syntactic features are required in addition to the set of semantic features in order to account for those agreement facts (Wechsler & Zlatić 2000, 2003). The proposal defended here with two sets of agreement features is shown to be superior to the alternative with three feature sets because it not only is simpler and accounts for the facts just as well, but it also does not make some incorrect predictions that the alternative makes when crucial facts are considered.

Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012) carried out two experiments in which they measured individual differences in memory to test processing accounts of island effects. They found that these individual differences failed to predict the magnitude of island effects, and they construe these findings as counterevidence to processing-based accounts of island effects. Here, we take up several problems with their methods, their findings, and their conclusions.

First, the arguments against processing accounts are based on null results using tasks that may be ineffective or inappropriate measures of working memory (the n-back and serial-recall tasks). The authors provide no evidence that these two measures predict judgments for other constructions that are difficult to process and yet are clearly grammatical. They assume that other measures of working memory would have yielded the same result, but provide no justification that they should. We further show that whether a working-memory measure relates to judgments of grammatical, hard-to-process sentences depends on how difficult the sentences are. In this light, the stimuli used by the authors present processing difficulties other than the island violations under investigation and may have been particularly hard to process. Second, the Sprouse et al. results are statistically in line with the hypothesis that island sensitivity varies with working memory. Three out of the four island types in their experiment 1 show a significant relation between memory scores and island sensitivity, but the authors discount these findings on the grounds that the variance accounted for is too small to have much import. This interpretation, however, runs counter to standard practices in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and psychology.