31 results
Amodal phonology
- IRIS BERENT, OUTI BAT-EL, DIANE BRENTARI, QATHERINE ANDAN, VERED VAKNIN-NUSBAUM
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- Journal of Linguistics / Volume 57 / Issue 3 / August 2021
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- 25 November 2020, pp. 499-529
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- August 2021
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Does knowledge of language transfer spontaneously across language modalities? For example, do English speakers, who have had no command of a sign language, spontaneously project grammatical constraints from English to linguistic signs? Here, we address this question by examining the constraints on doubling. We first demonstrate that doubling (e.g. panana; generally: ABB) is amenable to two conflicting parses (identity vs. reduplication), depending on the level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). We next show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project these two parses to novel ABB signs in American Sign Language. Moreover, the chosen parse (for signs) is constrained by the morphology of spoken language. Hebrew speakers can project the morphological parse when doubling indicates diminution, but English speakers only do so when doubling indicates plurality, in line with the distinct morphological properties of their spoken languages. These observations suggest that doubling in speech and signs is constrained by a common set of linguistic principles that are algebraic, amodal and abstract.
Where does (sign) language begin?
- Iris Berent, Amanda Dupuis
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- Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 40 / 2017
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- 26 April 2017, e48
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Goldin-Meadow & Brentari (G-M&B) outline several criteria for delineating the boundaries between (discrete) signs and (continuous) gestures. However, the complex links between linguistics forms and their phonetic realizations defy such heuristics. A systematic exploration of language structure by mouth and by hand may help get us closer to answering the important challenge outlined in this target article.
1 - Genesis
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 3-8
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Summary
What does an embryo resemble when it is in the bowels of its mother? Folded writing tablets. Its hands rest on its two temples respectively, its two elbows on its two legs and its two heels against its buttocks . . . A light burns above its head and it looks and sees from one end of the world to the other, as it is said, then his lamp shined above my head, and by His light I walked through darkness (Job XXIX, 3) . . . It is also taught all the Torah from beginning to end, for it is said, And he taught me, and said unto me: “Let thy heart hold fast my words, keep my commandments and live” (Prov. IV, 4) . . . As soon as it sees the light, an angel approaches, slaps it on its mouth and causes it to forget all the Torah completely . . .
(Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Niddah, folio 30b “Niddah,” 1947)Of the various aspects of human nature, the biology of our knowledge systems is an area we struggle to grasp. The possibility that our knowledge might be predetermined by our organic makeup is something we find difficult to accept. This is not because we resist our condition as biological organisms – living breathing bodies whose design is shaped by natural laws and evolution. We rarely give a second thought to our lack of fur or our inability to fly and swim underwater. We are not even disturbed by many obvious shortcomings of our mental faculties – our inability to perceive infrared light, the fallibility of our memory, and the haphazard fleeting character of our attention. Those fickle quirks of our neural machinery are surely inconvenient, but they rarely leave us pondering the confinements of our fate.
11 - The phonological brain
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 251-279
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Previous chapters have suggested that the human mind is equipped with core phonological knowledge – a system specialized for the computation of phonological structure. This chapter examines what brain mechanisms mediate phonological computation and evaluate their presumed genetic underpinnings. While the findings suggest that a neural phonological network certainly exists, they cannot determine whether this network is specialized for phonology. An answer to this question hinges on how specialization is defined, and, more generally, how cognitive explanations are linked to neuroanatomical models. Existing neuroanatomical models presently lack an explicit account of that link. I thus conclude that specialization, in general, and the hypothesis of core phonology, specifically, can be presently evaluated primarily at the functional, cognitive level. Neural data can be profitably correlated with functional findings, but they can rarely falsify functional hypotheses concerning specialization.
Individuating cognitive functions: functional specialization vs. hardware segregation
At the center of this book is the question of specialization: Are human minds equipped with a system specialized for phonological patterning? The previous chapters present several observations that are consistent with this possibility. We have seen that distinct phonological systems share design principles that distinguish them from nonlinguistic systems, that knowledge of grammatical universals is evident even when they concern structures unattested in one’s language, and that the capacity for phonological patterning emerges spontaneously, in the absence of a model. Not only are phonological constraints universal and possibly innate, but they are also demonstrably distinct from nonlinguistic pressures, most notably, the phonetic pressures governing the processing of aural stimuli and their production. Functional specialization, however, should be further mirrored at the neural level. If the mind has a specialized computational system dedicated to phonological patterning, then one would expect this special “software” to require a specialized brain “hardware” that mediates phonological computation. The brain networks that support phonological computation could potentially present another test for the specialization of the phonological mind.
The Phonological Mind
- Iris Berent
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013
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Humans instinctively form words by weaving patterns of meaningless speech elements. Moreover, we do so in specific, regular ways. We contrast dogs and gods, favour blogs to lbogs. We begin forming sound-patterns at birth and, like songbirds, we do so spontaneously, even in the absence of an adult model. We even impose these phonological patterns on invented cultural technologies such as reading and writing. But why are humans compelled to generate phonological patterns? And why do different phonological systems - signed and spoken - share aspects of their design? Drawing on findings from a broad range of disciplines including linguistics, experimental psychology, neuroscience and comparative animal studies, Iris Berent explores these questions and proposes a new hypothesis about the architecture of the phonological mind.
12 - Phonological technologies: reading and writing
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 280-306
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Core knowledge systems outline not only our early, instinctive, and universal understanding of the world but also provide scaffolds for subsequent learning. Like the core systems of number, physics, and social knowledge, our instinctive phonological knowledge sets the stage for the cultural invention of reading and writing. This chapter outlines the intimate link between early phonological competence and those later “phonological technologies.” We will see that all writing systems – both conventional orthographies and the ones invented spontaneously by children – are based on phonological principles. Reading, in turn, entails the automatic decoding of phonological structure from print. Skilled reading recruits the phonological brain network that mediates spoken language processing. Moreover, dyslexia is typically marked by hereditary deficits to phonological processing and phonological awareness. The role of instinctive phonology as a scaffold for reading and writing is in line with its being viewed as a system of core knowledge.
Core knowledge as a scaffold for mature knowledge systems
In previous chapters, we have seen that phonological systems manifest a unique, potentially universal design that is evident already in early development. The special design of the phonological system is in line with the characteristics of core knowledge systems documented in numerous other domains, including knowledge of number, agency, space, and morality (Bloom, 2010; Carey, 2009; Carey & Spelke, 1996; Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, 2010; Hamlin et al., 2007; Hauser & Spelke, 2004; Spelke, 2000). These early knowledge systems each includes distinct representational primitives and combinatorial principles that are innate, universal and domain specific. For example, infants as young as 4 months of age manifest rudimentary knowledge of number – they can represent the precise number of up to four objects (larger numbers are encoded approximately), and they can perform addition and subtraction operations on such small sets. In the domain of physics, young infants possess intuitive knowledge that leads them to expect objects to move cohesively (without disintegrating) and continuously (without jumping from one point to another and without intersecting other objects) as a result of contact with other objects. Other principles of morality might underlie 3-month-old infants’ preference for social “helpers” (a character helping another climb up the hill) to “hinderers” (a character who interferes with the climber’s efforts).
13 - Conclusions, caveats, questions
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 307-315
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Summary
Finally, his time has come, the same angel approaches him and says to him: “Do you recognize me?” And the man tells him: “Yes.” And says: “Why did you come to me today of all days?” “To remove you from this world since it is your time to abate,” says the angel. Immediately he begins crying, and sounds his voice from one end of the world to the other. And no one recognizes or hears his voice, except the rooster alone. And he tells the angel, “You had already removed me from two worlds and brought me into this one.” And the angel tells him, “But I had already told you, against your will you were created, and against your will you were born, and against your will you live, and against your will you die, and against your will you are to give an account before God almighty” . . .
(Midrash Tanhuma, pekudei: 3, translation mine)In this Jewish tradition, innate knowledge and destiny go hand in hand. It is the same angel who had endowed the embryo with knowledge of the entire Torah that now appears to him in old age and summons him to the next world. Recognizing the angel, the man wishes to avert his demise, just as he had previously attempted to prevent his birth. But neither knowledge nor fate is in our hands. And just as man’s vain resistance to his arrival on this earth only resulted in the loss of precious knowledge, so is it futile when it comes to his departure.
While modern science attributes to humans far greater control over their knowledge, the findings reviewed in this book suggest that some forms of knowledge might be nonetheless determined by our biology. But precisely what aspects of our knowledge are universally human, to what extent knowledge is predetermined, and what mechanisms are responsible for its fixation and plasticity are the subject of much debate. This final chapter summarizes my conclusions so far.
5 - How phonological patterns are assembled
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 84-114
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Chapter 5 further investigates the scope of phonological categories and the principles governing their combinations. Specifically, I examine whether phonological patterns encode relations among variables – the hallmark of powerful algebraic systems capable of generating discrete infinity. To this end, I systematically gauge the scope of phonological generalizations using a single case study taken from Hebrew. Hebrew manifests an interesting restriction on the location of identical consonants. It allows stems such as simem (with identical consonants at the right edge), but disallows forms like sisem (with identical consonant at the left edge). Remarkably, Hebrew speakers freely extend this generalization not only to any native consonant (thereby providing further evidence that consonants form an equivalence class) but also to novel ones, including novel consonants with novel features. Such generalizations, as I next show, are only attainable by computational devices that operate on variables. Accordingly, the documentation of such generalizations in Hebrew demonstrates that the phonological grammar is an algebraic system endowed with the capacity for across-the-board generalizations, comparable to syntactic generalizations. But while algebraic machinery is clearly necessary to account for phonological generalizations, further evidence suggests it is not sufficient. A full account of phonological generalizations thus requires a dual-route model, equipped with an algebraic grammar and an associative lexical system.
How do phonological categories combine to form patterns?
All patterns comprise building blocks, assembled according to some combinatorial principles. Chapter 4 suggested that the building blocks of phonological patterns are abstract categories that form equivalence classes. The equivalence of category members is significant because it supports broad generalizations of phonological knowledge. Specifically, if all instances of a category are treated alike, then knowledge concerning the category will automatically extend to new members. But while the findings reviewed so far strongly suggest that some phonological categories are equivalence classes, the classes we had considered were not only finite but also quite small. This limitation raises the question of whether the phonological grammar does, in fact, support open-ended generalizations, known as the capacity for “discrete infinity” (Chomsky, 1972).
2 - Instinctive phonology
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 9-34
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Humans have some special phonological talents. We instinctively intuit that certain phonological patterns are preferred to others even if we have never heard them before, and we will weave phonological patterns regardless of whether our language uses oral speech or manual gestures. Phonological instincts are so robust that people spontaneously generate a whole phonological system anew, and when human cultures invent systems of reading and writing, they impose those patterns on their design. Phonological patterns, however, are not arbitrary: they conform to some recurrent principles of design. These principles are broadly shared across many languages, but they are quite distinct from those found in animal communication or music. This chapter documents those instinctive talents of our species, and in so doing, it lays down the foundation for discussing the architecture of the phonological system in subsequent chapters.
People possess knowledge of sound patterns
All human communities have natural languages that impose detailed, systematic restrictions on phonological patterns. Unlike traffic laws or the US Constitution, the restrictions on language structure, in general, and phonological patterning, specifically, are not known explicitly. Most people are not aware of those restrictions, and even when professional linguists desperately try to unveil them, these regularities are not readily patent to them. Yet, all healthy human beings know these restrictions tacitly – we encode them in our brain and mind and we religiously follow them in our everyday speech despite our inability to state them consciously. And indeed, we all have strong intuitions that certain sound structures are systematically preferable to others (see 1–3). For example, English speakers generally agree that blog is better-sounding than lbog; they prefer apt to tpa; they consider came as rhyming with same or even rain (indicated by ~), but not ripe; and they have precise intuitions on the parsing of words into smaller constituents. A frustrated motorist might refer to their noisy car exhaust as an eg-freaking-zaust, but not an e-freaking-gzhaust (a fact marked by the * sign, which conventionally indicates ill-formed linguistic structures).
Syllable-structure intuitions
Rhyme
Parsing exhaust
Part IV - Ontogeny, phylogeny, phonological hardware, and technology
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 199-200
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7 - Phonological universals are mirrored in behavior
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 149-164
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The view of phonology as a system of core knowledge predicts that the grammars of all speakers include a common set of universal constraints. This chapter illustrates the use of experimental methods to test this hypothesis. The experiments reviewed here compare participants’ ability to learn structures that are universally marked to their ability to learn unmarked structures. As predicted, unmarked structures are learned more readily. Moreover, the advantage of unmarked structures obtains even when marked and unmarked structures are both absent in participants’ language. While these results reveal a strong correlation between typological regularities and the behavior of individual speakers, they leave open questions regarding its source – whether the convergence results from universal grammatical constraints or from non-grammatical origins. These findings underscore some of the difficult challenges facing the experimental study of grammatical universals.
The view of phonology as a system of core knowledge predicts that all grammars converge on a common design, defined by a universal set of primitives and constraints. The evidence reviewed in the previous chapter supported this hypothesis. We saw that diverse languages, signed and spoken, manifest some strong structural regularities that systematically favor certain linguistic structures over others. We further showed how these cross-linguistic regularities (and variations) might emerge from the ranking of universal grammatical constraints. The universal grammar hypothesis, however, is not limited to an account of typological regularities. Indeed, the very same grammatical forces that shape the language typology are presumably active in the brains and minds of living breathing speakers. This strong hypothesis makes some interesting predictions that are amply amenable to experimental investigation. If this hypothesis is correct, then one would expect the behavior of individual speakers to mirror typological regularities: Unmarked phonological structures should be preferred to their marked counterparts. And if the preference for unmarked structures is universally active, then the preference for unmarked structures should be seen across all speakers, even if the structures under consideration are absent in their language.
6 - Phonological universals
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 117-148
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This chapter begins to examine whether the phonological grammar is a system of core knowledge. Core knowledge systems manifest a unique, universal design that features a common set of representational primitives and combinatorial principles. Our question here is whether such design is characteristic of phonological systems. To address this question, I first show that across languages, certain structures are systematically preferred to others. I next demonstrate how such regularities are explained in one influential theory of universal grammar (Optimality Theory) and illustrate how grammatical universals can be reconciled with several challenges, including the diversity of phonological systems and their strong grounding in phonetic constraints. I show that diversity can result from numerous sources, ones that are either internal to the grammar or external – most notably, the phonetic characteristics of the language. Phonetic pressures, however, cannot subsume grammatical phonological principles. Indeed, licit phonological structures are not invariably ones that are phonetically optimal. Moreover, spoken languages share aspects of their design with signed languages despite their dramatic phonetic differences. I conclude that the linguistic evidence is amply consistent with the possibility that grammatical universals form part of the phonological mind. The next chapters proceed to test this hypothesis.
The previous chapters have demonstrated that the phonological grammar is an algebraic system – a system that encodes equivalence classes, represents their relations, and generalizes them across the board. While this algebraic machinery is quite powerful, it is not unique to phonology. Humans (and nonhuman species) exhibit broad algebraic generalizations in many areas, including the representation of number, navigation, and logical inferences. Although each such domain manifests distinct knowledge, these different “programs” all run on algebraic machinery. Accordingly, merely possessing algebraic machinery does not account for the various idiosyncratic properties of phonological systems outlined in Chapter 2. Algebraic machinery alone does not explain why every human language manifests a phonological system, why distinct phonological systems exhibit a common design, and why some design features are shared across modalities – spoken and signed. Algebraic machinery also cannot account for the spontaneous emergence of phonological systems in home signs and the Al-Sayyid Bedouin sign systems, nor does it explain why the properties of such systems differ from other means of auditory communication – human and nonhuman alike.
Index
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 10 January 2013, pp 352-360
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Tables
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 10 January 2013, pp x-x
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Frontmatter
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 10 January 2013, pp i-iv
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8 - Phonological universals are core knowledge
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 165-198
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This chapter examines the representation of grammatical phonological universals by pursuing an in-depth analysis of a single case study – the sonority restrictions on complex onsets (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, syllables like iblock are reliably favored over syllables like lbock. Of interest is whether these preferences reflect universal grammatical restrictions. We address this question in two steps. We first show that sonority restrictions are plausible candidates for a grammatical universal – they are amply evident in productive phonological processes and supported by typological data. We next proceed to examine whether this putative universal constrains people’s behavior in psychological experiments. Results from numerous experiments demonstrate that people are sensitive to sonority restrictions concerning onsets that they have never heard before. Sonority preferences, moreover, cannot be explained by several non-grammatical sources, including the phonetic properties of the experimental materials and their similarity to onsets that are attested in participants’ languages. By elimination, then, I conclude that people’s behavior is shaped by grammatical restrictions on sonority, and these restrictions extend broadly, perhaps universally, even to structures that are unattested in a speaker’s language. These conclusions suggest that universal grammatical restrictions might be active in the brains and minds of individual speakers.
Grammatical universals and experimental results:
The results described in the previous chapter suggest that people’s performance in psychological experiments mirrors putative universal grammatical constraints: Unmarked phonological structures – those that are systematically preferred across languages – are the ones learned more readily by individual speakers. While the correlation between human performance and grammatical constraints is suggestive, correlation is not evidence for causation. And indeed, the agreement between the typological and behavioral data could be due to various sources external to the grammar. The learning advantage of unmarked structures might reflect not existing universal knowledge that favors unmarked structures, but rather the fact that such structures are independently easier to process. The question then remains whether grammatical principles are, in fact, universally active in the brains of all speakers. More generally, our question is whether grammatical principles form part of a phonological system of core knowledge.
Figures
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 10 January 2013, pp viii-ix
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4 - How phonological categories are represented
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 10 January 2013, pp 63-83
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In earlier chapters, I suggested that the phonological grammar is an algebraic computational system. Phonological patterns, in this view, comprise abstract equivalence classes – categories whose members are all treated alike, regardless of whether they are familiar or novel. But on an alternative associationist account, phonological patterns bind chunks of phonological substance – the more likely two sound elements are to occur together, the more likely they are to form a chunk. Algebraic phonological categories are not represented by the human mind. To adjudicate between these two accounts, this chapter investigates the representation of two phonological primitives – syllables and the consonant/vowel distinction. If people represent these primitives as equivalence classes, then they should extend generalizations to any class member, irrespective of its statistical properties. The evidence emerging from a wide array of studies is consistent with this prediction.
What are phonological patterns made of?
Consider the phonological patterns in (1). In each line, the words share a pattern, and the patterns in the four lines are all different. The pattern in (1a) comprises a single unit; in (1d), it includes four units, and in (1b–c), the pattern has two units – either consonant- or vowel-initial. Our interest here concerns the nature of those units: What are the “beads” that form phonological necklaces, and what principles allow us to identify them?
9 - Out of the mouths of babes
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 05 February 2013
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- 10 January 2013, pp 201-225
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Previous chapters have examined the hypothesis of core phonology by inspecting the phonological grammars of adult speakers. Core phonology, however, potentially encompasses not only mature phonological systems but also the initial state of the grammar. It is the early onset of core phonological knowledge that might form the scaffold for mature phonological systems by providing a universal set of primitives and combinatorial principles. In this chapter, we examine whether universal primitives and principles are in fact active in early phonological systems. We demonstrate that at birth, infants possess algebraic computational machinery commensurable with the algebraic powers of adult grammars. The phonological preferences of infants and young children are likewise consistent with several of the primitives and markedness constraints seen in adult phonological systems; some of those preferences extend to structures that are unattested in the child’s language, and a handful is documented in early infancy. While the available findings are insufficient to fully evaluate the core knowledge hypothesis, they are nonetheless consistent with this possibility.
The evidence presented in the previous chapters suggests that, by the time humans reach adulthood, they possess an algebraic phonological grammar, equipped with representations and constraints that are putatively universal. How do human adults converge on this shared phonological system?
The answer, according to the core knowledge hypothesis, is that people are innately equipped with core phonological knowledge. Core knowledge determines the initial state of the grammar (“the initial state”) and, together with experience and nonlinguistic constraints, it guides mature phonological systems to converge on a similar final state (“the final state of the grammar”). If this hypothesis were correct, then one would expect early phonological systems to exhibit shared primitives and constraints. In its strongest form, the hypothesis of core phonological knowledge would predict that the phonological grammar is fully formed at birth; a weaker version might assume a later onset; this weaker version places the genesis of the phonological grammar somewhere after birth, but before the acquisition of language-particular phonotactics, near the child’s first birthday. Regardless of its precise onset, both views assert that core phonological knowledge should be present early in life. In what follows, we test this hypothesis.
References
- Iris Berent, Northeastern University, Boston
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- The Phonological Mind
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- 10 January 2013, pp 316-351
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