here - Linguistic Society of America

1880 to the present day. The overwhelming majority of the names that have been unisex names at some point during thattimeframe display the same pattern—the Ashley Pattern.Josef Fruehwald (University of Pennsylvania) Session 42Student Abstract Award WinnerDifferentiating phonetically and phonologically conditioned sound changeThe dividing line between phonetic effects and phonological processes is frequently unclear (Ohala, 1990; Cohn, 1993), and whensome linguistic context promotes or inhibits a sound change, it is not always clear if it does so due to a phonetic bias, orphonological selection. In this paper, we argue that it is possible to distinguish between phonetic biases and phonologicalselection in sound change by examining the trajectory of the change, and apply this quantitative reasoning to three sound changesin progress. Our data is drawn from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (Labov and Rosenfelder, 2011).Annie Gagliardi (Harvard University) Session 34Alexis Wellwood (University of Maryland)Jeff Lidz (University of Maryland)Modeling meaning choice for novel adjectives using Bayesian learningA growing body of work highlights children's ability to use syntax to determine the meanings of novel words. What about whensyntax is not informative? Wellwood et al (2012) showed that 4;0-5;0 year-olds leveraged knowledge of syntactic category tolearn that a novel superlative gleebest in determiner position, had a quantity-based interpretation (e.g., most ), yet chose a qualitybasedmeaning (e.g., spottiest) when it appeared in adjectival position. Using 4 computational models, we show that children'spreference for a quality-based interpretation with an ambiguous frame reflects lexical bias and ability to reliably encodeinformation from the environment.Susanne Gahl (University of California, Berkeley) Session 49Julia Strand (Carleton College)Explaining phonetic variation: Similarity vs. confusability as predictors of vowel dispersionDo talkers pronounce words clearly that might otherwise be difficult to understand? This question has inspired studiesinvestigating acoustic correlates of phonological neighborhood density (PND; the number of words differing from a target by onesegment), with seemingly contradictory results: While some (e.g. Munson, 2007) find evidence of hyperarticulation (e.g.increased vowel dispersion) in high-PND words, others (Gahl et al. 2012) find the opposite. These findings can be reconciled bydistinguishing PND and confusability (Strand & Sommers 2011). Vowel dispersion in single-word production varies withconfusability, but not PND, whereas vowel dispersion in connected speech reflects PND, but not confusability.Teresa Snow Galloway (Cornell University) Session 34Internally headed relative clauses in American Sign LanguageMy research demonstrates that internally headed relative clauses in ASL have previously been conflated with correlative clausesin the literature. Once differentiated, I show that internally headed relative clauses in ASL follow typological expectations in thatthey are nominalized, appear in argument position, and obey the indefiniteness restriction on the head proposed by Williamson(1987). As the question as to whether (and which) determiners in ASL mark definiteness is still debated, my research not onlycontributes to the proper identification of relative clause structures in ASL but also to a better understanding of the nature of ASLdeterminers.Marc Garellek (University of California, Los Angeles) Session 38Student Abstract Award WinnerProminence vs. phrase-initial strengthening of voice qualityThe goal of this study is to determine whether vocal fold contact increases under prominence and phrase-initial strengthening.Audio and electroglottographic recordings of 12 English and 12 Spanish speakers were made. Target words had word-initialvowels or sonorants, and varied according to prominence and phrasal position. Results indicate that prominent vowels showincreased vocal fold contact, probably due to glottalization. Surprisingly, a decrease in vocal fold contact is found for phraseinitialvowels and sonorants. Although inconsistent with phrase-initial strengthening, this can be explained by respiratory and/ormuscular constraints. Implications for theories of word-initial glottalization will be discussed.154