here - Linguistic Society of America

Iris Berent (Northeastern University) Session 47Amanda Dupuis (Northeastern University)Diane K Brentari (University of Chicago)Amodal aspects of linguistic designSpoken languages include syllables and morphemes, defined by distinct principles. Syllables require a single energy peak,whereas morphemes are not so constrained. Here, we show that humans extend these principles across modalities. Deaf ASLsigners extracted both syllables and morphemes from novel ASL signs. Remarkably, so did English speakers who had no previousexperience with sign languages. Moreover, given novel signs analogous to pens (one syllable, two morphemes), all participantsshifted their response depending on the task—syllable- vs. morpheme count. These findings suggest that the design of thelanguage system is partly amodal.Kelly Berkson (University of Kansas) Session 34Breathy voice in obstruents and sonotants: evidence from MarathiThis study investigates breathy voiced sonorants in Marathi. These sounds occur in fewer than 1% of the languages indexed in theUCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database. Analysis of them remains sparse, and our understanding of the acousticcorrelates of breathy phonation is incomplete. Measures reported herein for consonants and subsequent vowels include duration,F0, Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP), and corrected H1-H2* and H1-A3* values. Results indicate that breathy phonation is cuedby multiple parameters, and is associated with durational differences for both genders, with CPP differences for female speakers,and with F0 and H1-H2* differences for male speakers.Robert C. Berwick (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 6Pangus Ho (BBN, Inc.)Languages do not show lineage-specific trends in word-order universalsRecent research has used probabilistic evolutionary models of word-order language traits, overlaid on linguistic phylogenies, todetermine whether pairs of word-order ‘universals’ evolved in tandem, concluding that such coevolution holds only for certainlanguage families and not others, hence is ‘lineage specific.’ In contrast, this paper finds that if one carries out far more extensivecomputer simulations to reduce the stochastic noise inherent in this methodology, most co-variation disappears, at least for Indo-European languages. Further, in some cases, the possibility of ‘polymorphic’ traits leads to inaccuracies. Taken together, the‘lineage specific’ claim appears to be unsupported by this detailed analysis.Robert C. Berwick (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 23Marco Idiart (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)Igor Malioutov (Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBeracah Yankama (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Aline Villavicencio (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)Keep it simple: language acquisition without complex Bayesian modelsSophisticated statistical learning techniques known as hierarchical Bayesian models (HBMs) have been advanced to captureobserved patterns of both under- and over-generalization in child language acquisition. However, HBMs are ‘ideal’ learningsystems, often computationally infeasible even using approximation methods; their cognitive relevance remains uncertain. Thispaper shows that a much simpler method, maximum likelihood estimation, can match HBM performance. It reviews andreanalyzes dative alternations compiled from child-directed CHILDES English, extended to child utterances. It demonstrates thatcombining simple clustering methods along with MLE provides an alternative, more cognitively plausible account of the samefacts.Sarah Bibyk (University of Rochester) Session 34Willemijn Heeren (Leiden University)Christine Gunglogson (University of Rochester)Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)Asking or telling? Real-time processing of boundary tonesAlthough there is a growing literature on the use of prosody in sentence processing, little research has focused to date onboundary tones. We developed a targeted language game in which we could naturally embed elliptical expressions whereboundary tones disambiguated the sentence as a question or a statement. Results provide evidence for rapid processing of L-L%.131