On the acquisition of abstract representations for English vowels

1986 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 71-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Ohala ◽  
Jeri J. Jaeger
Keyword(s):  
Basic Assumption ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Psychological Reality ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Abstract Representations ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Vowel Shift ◽  
Lexical Phonology

ABSTRACT A basic assumption of generative and lexical phonology is that lexical entries of morphemes contain abstract phonological representations (APRs), and that surface pronunciations are derived from them by rules. Whether and how such a system can be acquired is problematic. This paper looks at the acquisition of APRs for English vowels and the Vowel Shift Rule (VSR), and tries to ascertain (1) whether VSR has any psychological reality, (2) at what age this psychological reality begins to be manifested, and (3) what the source of any psychological reality of VSR is. It finds that (1) pre-literate children show no signs of knowing VSR, (2) literate children and adults show marginal knowledge of only those VSR relations represented by the English vowel letters, and (3) the source of this knowledge can be demonstrated to be the learning of spelling conventions. It is concluded that theories which posit more concrete lexical representations are supported by this evidence.

scholarly journals Phonetic effects of morphology and context: Modeling the duration of word-final S in English with naïve discriminative learning

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
FABIAN TOMASCHEK ◽  
INGO PLAG ◽  
MIRJAM ERNESTUS ◽  
R. HARALD BAAYEN
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Discriminative Learning ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Context Modeling ◽  
Learning Network ◽  
Theoretical Morphology ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Lexical Phonology ◽  
Segment Duration

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differences between phonologically homophonous affixes, e.g. the different kinds of final [s] and [z] in English (Plag, Homann & Kunter 2017, Zimmermann 2016a). Such results are unexpected and unaccounted for in widely accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexical phonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticizedhas, and cliticizedis) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naïve discriminative learning and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker, Sims & Baayen 2019), indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with a wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.

scholarly journals Phonology and Writing: Can we look at written productions to “see the unseeable” in phonology?

Loquens ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 059 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Veloso
Keyword(s):  
School Children ◽  
Basic Assumption ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Phonological Knowledge ◽  
General Aspects ◽  
Generative Approach

Oral and written productions of language seem to correspond to ontologically separate entities. In this paper, we shall not argue against this basic assumption. However, it will be proposed that a careful examination of the writing systems and of particular written productions can provide phonologists with important information about the nature of phonological representations. Writing systems often originate in relevant intuitions about the nature of phonological units and phenomena and preserve the morphophonemic kinships between roots and words that are surfaced as phonetically distinct. The same can be said about the written productions of pre-school children and illiterate adults, strongly shaped by phonological intuitions rather than by orthographic convention. Bearing in mind that phonology, within the generative approach that is adopted here, is a form of knowledge, spelling can be accepted as a way of getting access to phonological knowledge. Therefore, our main point is that, in spite of the classical divide between spoken and written language, attention to writing can be useful for the understanding of the phonological level, too. The article includes two main parts: firstly, on Sections 2 and 3, we shall survey some general aspects of the relation between phonological and written representations; the second part consists mainly of Section 4 and attempts to illustrate some of the topics presented in Sections 2 and 3 with some data of a small-scale study with Portuguese pre-schoolers.

Morphologically conditioned phonological alternations

2019 ◽  
pp. 168-198
Author(s):  
Ray Jackendoff ◽  
Jenny Audring
Keyword(s):  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Parallel Architecture ◽  
Vowel Reduction ◽  
Algebraic Form ◽  
Vowel Shift ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Lexical Phonology ◽  
Phonetic Representation ◽  
Constraint Ranking

This chapter asks how affixes can affect the phonology of their stems, as in harmony/ harmonic/harmonious. Within the Parallel Architecture, phonology is an algebraic form of representation, while phonetic representation is analog in character. Their relation is negotiated by an interface that relates phonological segments and sequences to positions and trajectories in phonetic space. In these terms, the chapter explores aspiration, final devoicing, vowel shift and vowel reduction, affixes like -ity and -ious that manipulate the phonology of their bases, and affixes that can blend with their bases, for instance flattery (= flatter+ery). Again the formal machinery of sister schemas plays an important role in the account, taking over the work done in other theories by derivation (as in SPE and Lexical Phonology) and constraint ranking (as in Optimality Theory)

The Early Modern English Vowels, More O' Lass

Diachronica ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Stockwell ◽  
Donka Minkova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Qualitative Difference ◽  
Central Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Phonology ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
English Vowels ◽  
Nous Croyons ◽  
Vowel Shift

SUMMARY Roger Lass has proposed radical revisions of widely known assessments of some of the evidence concerning the pronunciation of early modern English. We accept many of his claims, but we argue that his revisions are wrong on one central point, and questionable in three less important ones. The central one is his conclusion that no qualitative difference accompanied the 'length' contrast in the high and mid vowels of early modern English. We believe that the clash between the orthoepical evidence and the traditional interpretations lies in the difficulty of reconstructing redundant vs. distinctive features in historical phonology. The other three issues have to do with aspects of the English vowel shift that have already been widely debated. RÉSUMÉ Roger Lass a proposé des révisions radicales des interprétations conventionnelles d'une partie de l'évidence concernant la prononciation de l'anglais moderne précoce. Les auteurs de cet article acceptent plusieurs de ses affirmations, mais ils allèguent que ses révisions sont fausses sur un point central et douteuses dans trois cas moins importants. Notre objection principale concerne la conclusion de Lass qu'aucune différence qualitative accompagnait le contraste de 'longeur' dans les voyelles hautes et moyennes de l'anglais moderne précoce. Nous croyons, par contre, que le conflit entre l'évidence orthoépique et les interprétations traditionnelles se trouve dans la difficulté, en phonologie historique, de reconstruire l'opposition entre des traits redondants et des traits distinctifs. Les trois autres points désaccord concernent des aspects du changement des voyelles en anglais qui ont été déjà débattus largement ailleurs. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Roger Lass hat radikale Revisionen weithin bekannter Annahmen beziig-lich der Aussprache des Frühneuenglischen vorgeschlagen. Die Autoren akzep-tieren eine Reihe von ihnen. Sie argumentieren jedoch, daB seine Revisionen zumindest in einem zentralen Punkt unrichtig sind und fraglich in drei weniger bedeutenden Punkten. Der Hauptpunkt unserer Kritik hat mit seiner SchluBfol-gerung zu tun, derzufolge der 'Längen'-Kontrast innerhalb der hohen und minieren Vokale des Frühneuenglischen nicht von einem qualitativen Unterschied begleitet worden sei. Die Autoren nehmen dagegen an, daB der Zusammenprall von orthoepischer Evidenz und traditionellen Interpretationen in der Schwierig-keit liegt, in der historischen Phonologie den Unterschied zwischen redundan-ten und distinktiven Merkmalen zu rekonstruieren. Die übrigen drei Einwen-dungen betreffen Aspekte der englischen Vokalverschiebung, die schon an an-derer Stelle diskutiert worden sind.

Direct mapping of acoustics to phonology: On the lexical encoding of front rounded vowels in L1 English– L2 French acquisition

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Darcy ◽  
Laurent Dekydtspotter ◽  
Rex A Sprouse ◽  
Justin Glover ◽  
Christiane Kaden ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Advanced Learners ◽  
Categorization Task ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Minimal Pairs ◽  
Direct Mapping ◽  
Intermediate Learners ◽  
Phonetic Categorization

It is well known that adult US-English-speaking learners of French experience difficulties acquiring high /y/–/u/ and mid /œ/–/ɔ/ front vs. back rounded vowel contrasts in French. This study examines the acquisition of these French vowel contrasts at two levels: phonetic categorization and lexical representations. An ABX categorization task (for details, see Section IV) revealed that both advanced and intermediate learners categorized /œ/ vs. /ɔ/ and /y/ vs. /u/ differently from native speakers of French, although performance on the /y/–/u/ contrast was more accurate than on the /œ/–/ɔ/ contrast in all contexts. On a lexical decision task with repetition priming, advanced learners and native speakers produced no (spurious) response time (RT) facilitations for /y/–/u/ and /œ/–/ɔ/ minimal pairs; however, in intermediate learners, the decision for a word containing /y/ was speeded by hearing an otherwise identical word containing /u/ (and vice versa), suggesting that /u/ and /y/ are not distinguished in lexical representations. Thus, while it appears that advanced learners encoded the /y/–/u/ and /œ/–/ɔ/ contrasts in the phonological representations of lexical items, they gained no significant benefit on the categorization task. This dissociation between phonological representations and phonetic categorization challenges common assumptions about their relationship and supports a novel approach we label ‘direct mapping from acoustics to phonology’ (DMAP).

Old English vowels: Diachrony, privativity, and phonological representations

Language ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. e447-e473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Purnell ◽  
Eric Raimy ◽  
Joseph Salmons
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
English Vowels
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