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This article proposes and tests an experimental method to assess the psychological reality of hierarchical theories of constituent structure in particular domains. I show that a hierarchical theory of constituent structure necessarily makes the prediction that an association between constituents should be easier to learn than an association between strings that cross constituent boundaries, whereas dependency-based theories of constituency predict that constituents cannot have associations that their parts do not have. Previous research has shown that the major division within an English syllable is between the onset and the nucleus, rather than between the nucleus and the coda. Thus, the nucleus forms a constituent (the rime) with the coda rather than the onset. The hierarchical theory of constituency thus proposes that English speakers should learn rime-affix associations more easily than body-affix associations and that the rime can have associations that its parts do not have. These predictions are confirmed in the present study. Applications of the experimental method and its variants to linguistic constituency in other domains are discussed.
A number of recent attempts by nonlinguists to reconstruct linguistic evolutionary trees have made news. Reconstructions of the phylogeny of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages are especially well represented; well-known examples include Rexová et al. 2003, Gray & Atkinson 2003—which is discussed by Searls (2003) and briefly reported in U.S. news & world report (10 December 2003)—and Forster & Toth 2003, which also generated considerable attention in the popular media. Scientific linguists have not been impressed for a variety of reasons. Though no two of the publications in question exhibit exactly the same weaknesses, all can be impugned on one or more of the following grounds: the linguistic data employed have not been adequately analyzed, or—in some cases—even competently analyzed; the model of language change employed has not been shown to fit the known facts of language change; attempts to fix the dates of prehistoric languages have ignored the fatal shortcomings of glottochronology discovered by Bergsland and Vogt (1962; see further §4); the researchers assume that vocabulary replacement is governed by a LEXICAL CLOCK (similar to the controversial MOLECULAR CLOCK posited by some biological cladists); and/or the data set used is too small to yield statistically reliable conclusions.