Transcript Linguistics 460

Li6 Phonology and Morphology
Roman Jakobson, 1896-1982
Features and natural classes
Today’s topics
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Natural classes  features
Evidence for features
Natural classes
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There is robust evidence from many domains
that phonemes pattern in natural classes.
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Quick example: glide suppression in AmE
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Tune, dew, news, lute, suit…
Pure, bugle, cute, music…
Hypothesis: phonemes composed of features
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Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, and Karcevsky 1928
Drawing on decompositional theories of Plato, Democritus
Analogous to elements being made of atoms, or more
accurately atoms being made of electrons, protons, etc.
Basic idea: natural class behavior involved manipulation
of simple feature combos (typically 1 feature)
Analysis of glide suppression: no glide / [coronal] _ /u:/
Evidence for features
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Conventional evidence
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Synchronic alternations, Historical change
Psycholinguistic evidence
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Speech errors, priming studies…
Synchronic alternations
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Spanish spirantization
noun
definite
banca [baŋka]
la banca [la βaŋka]
demora [demora]
la demora [la emora]
gana [gana]
la gana [la γana]
 Why {b d g} ~ {β  γ}, not e.g. *{r m e}?
 Spread of [+continuant]
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English voicing assimilation
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e.g. plural /-z/  [s] / {ptkfθ(x)} _
Place assimilation
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i[n]ept
i[n]decent
i[m]plausible
i[ŋ]capable
gloss
bank
delay
desire
Historical change
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Grimm’s Law
Latin
English
pater
father
ped-
foot
trēs
three
IE
Lat
English
dent-
tooth
canis
hound
centum
hundred
*p *t *k
p t k
f θ h
Innovation: *[-voice] > [+continuant]
Which is shorthand for:
“All voiceless phonemes become [+continuant]”
Potential problem
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One might argue that synchronic alternations
are the residue of historical changes, which in
turn are the result of physical constraints on
perception and production, and therefore
don’t need to be encoded in terms of
features.
This, however, doesn’t account for the wide
range of psycholinguistic evidence…
Psycholinguistic evidence
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Disorders
Neurolinguistic studies
Speech errors
Child and adult acquisition facts
Priming and masking studies
Disorders
Language disorders
Stopping
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fvszθ→pbtdtd
[+continuant] → [-continuant]
Devoicing
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bdg→ptk
[+voice] → [-voice]
[cons]: C-V dissociations
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Dysgraphic patients show strong tendency for substitution
and transposition errors to preserve the C/V status of
letters
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Cotelli et al. 2003
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Patient recovered from fluent aphasia to selective dysgraphia
The spelling disorder was selective for vowels
Ferreres et al. 2003
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E.g. 82% of AS’s substitutions and 62% of his transposition errors
preserved CV status
Patient with alexia secondary to cerebral lesion
Errors in the reading of non-words affect vowels more than consonants.
(Cf. also Miceli et al. 2004, Buchwald and Rapp (forthcoming))
A case study…
Caramazza, Miceli, and Chialant 2000
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Alicia, 41, failed to correctly produce vowels three times
more often than consonants.
Irena, 52, had the opposite problem; she failed three times
more often on consonants.
For example, instead of saying "leggere" ("to read" in Italian),
Irena might say "seppere" and Alicia "loggiare." Both words
are meaningless.
Neurolinguistics
Mismatch fields and [voice]
pæ tæ tæ kæ dæ pæ kæ tæ pæ kæ bæ tæ ...
– –
– –
[+voi]
–
– –
– – [+voi] – …
• Voiceless phonemes are in many-to-one ratio with
[+voice] phonemes
• No other many-to-one ratio in this sequence
Phillips, Pellathy & Marantz 2000
Mismatch fields and [voice]
Phillips, Pellathy & Marantz 2000
Speech errors
Speech errors (Fromkin 1971)
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voicing [voice]
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glear plue sky
pig and vat
is bat a curl
place [coronal, dorsal, labial…]
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clear blue sky
big and fat
is Pat a girl
computation
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po[ŋ]kutation
nasality [nasal]
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Cedars of Lebanon 
Cedars of Lemadon
Speech errors (Jaeger 1992)
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Children as young as 1;7 make slips in which single
consonants or single vowels are substituted or
exchanged, implying segmental organization in
phonological representations.
Corpus of 366 consonant substitutions and reversals
made by children aged 1;7-6;0 subjected to a
multidimensional scaling analysis
Findings
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errors governed by patterns of phonetic similarity,
suggesting that these segments have phonetic (feature)
structure.
Errors by feature (in decreasing order of frequency):
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place of articulation
[voice]
[nasal]
Acquisition
L1 Acquisition errors
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[continuant]
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p for
t for
d for
f
s, θ
z, 
[maip] ‘knife’
[tuwt] ‘suit’; [ba:t] ‘bath’
[dd] ‘does’; [d] ‘other’
place of articulation
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Dorsal harmony (English)
 take → [gek]
Labial harmony (Dutch, English)
 snoep ‘candy’ → [fup], zeep ‘soap’ → [fep]
Dorsal or coronal default
 kiss → tiss (“positional velar fronting”)
 Japanese children often replace t with k
Acquisition of manner
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Jusczyk, Goodman, and Baumann 1999
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Nine-month-old English-learners
Headturn Preference Procedure
Infants exposed to two types of lists of CVC syllables
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Items in the experimental lists shared a particular
phonetic property
Items in the control lists were unrelated
Results
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9-month-olds sensitive to shared features that occur at
the beginnings, but not at the ends of syllables.
They had significant listening preferences for lists in
which the items shared the same manner of articulation at
syllable onsets.
Association
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Žagar and Locke 1986
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Method
 Ten children, aged 4;6 to 5;5, trained to associate
consonantal features of voicing, manner, and place of
articulation with cups of a particular location and color.
Results
 Performance on untrained generalization trials
exceeded chance on voicing and manner, but not on
place of articulation.
Conclusion
 Children store sounds with feature structure and can
target these features in generalization formation.
Learning nonce words
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Anisfeld, Barlow, and Frail 1968
Method
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Results
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1st and 2nd graders (i.e. 6-8 yrs old) given CVC singular nonce
words (e.g. NAR) orally
Asked to choose between two plurals (e.g. NARF vs NARK)
Kids preferred final sounds agreeing with /z/ for [continuant] or
[strident]
Conclusion
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Kids’ plural rules are formulated in terms of features, not
segments
When forced to pick a new plural, they pick the option that
shares the most features with their normal plural affix.
Adult acquisition
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Pycha et al. 2003
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Is a less formally complex grammar (with
complexity computed in terms of features) easier to
learn?
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simple:
complex:
Xα…X  Xα…Xα
Xα,β…X  Xα,β…X
Adult acquisition
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Design
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Subjects asked to learn patterns of non-local vowel interaction
by listening to nonce words.
 Subjects told they’re listening to singular-plural pairs in a new
language, and their task is to learn how to make plurals in this
language.
Each word consists of a CVC stem followed by a VC suffix
whose vowel alternates according to the vowel of the stem.
Subjects listen to pairs of stem and suffixed forms exhibiting a
particular pattern, and are then asked to make judgments
about novel pairs of stem and suffixed forms.
Correct judgments taken as an indication of learning.
Adult acquisition
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Experimental condition
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[+simple]
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Stem and suffix V agree in backness
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[-back] root: CiC-εk, CIC-εk, CæC-εk
[+back] root: CuC-k, CUC-k, CaC-k
Control condition
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[-simple]
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Stem and suffix V may agree or disagree in [back],
depending upon what the stem V is
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CiC-εk, CUC-εk, CæC-εk
CuC-k, CIC-k, CaC-k
Adult acquisition
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Results
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Interpretation
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Confirmation of Simplicity Hypothesis:
 naïve listeners learned phonological processes that exhibited
single-feature predictability significantly better than processes
that did not.
Priming and masking
Priming and features
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Lukatela et al 2001
Question:
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Method
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mask--prime--target--mask sequence with both brief (57 ms in
Experiments 1 and 2) and long (486 ms in Experiment 1) prime
durations.
Results
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Does the priming of a word (e.g. sea, film, basic) by a rhyming non-word
depend on the non-word's featural similarity to the word?
Non-word primes that differed from their targets by a single phonemic
feature (initial voicing as in ZEA, VILM, PASIC) led to faster target lexical
decisions than non-word primes that differed by more than a single
phonemic feature (e.g. VEA, JILM, SASIC).
Conclusion
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Visual word recognition seems to involve a feature-based level of
processing.
Backwards masking
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Bedoin and Chavand 2000
 Question
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Method
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Does phonetic similarity improve performance in backward-masking
experiments?
Subjects had to recall a briefly presented target that had been
immediately replaced (masked) by another stimulus.
This task is difficult because target processing is disrupted by the mask.
This disruptive effect is reduced when the target and mask are
orthographically or phonemically similar (Perfetti & Bell 1991).
Results
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Featural similarity reduced deleterious masking effects
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e.g. DÉBUT /deby/ was better identified if masked by zévut (differs only in
[cont]) than by séfut (which differs in [cont] and [voice]).
Conclusion
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The features [voice] and [continuant] appear to be involved in processing.
Intraword priming/masking
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Krifi et al 2003
Method
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Results
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Adult skilled readers and third graders with average reading level
phonetic priming and masking effects were assessed within one
briefly presented CVCV printed nonce stimulus. The consonant
target (C1 or C2) was either similar or different in voicing to the
other consonant.
DUBA, DUPA, TOBI, TOPI
C’s used: {dbgvzž}, {tpkfsš} (factors out gestalt acoustic similarity)
Voicing similarity impaired C2 consonant detection
Voicing similarity improved C1 consonant detection
Conclusions
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Involvement of phoneme detectors organised by inhibitory
relations based on shared features.
Summary
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We’ve seen evidence for these features:
[voice]
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[continuant]
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m, n, ŋ
[consonantal]
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vowels, liquids, glides, fricatives
[nasal]
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vowels, glides, liquids, nasals, voiced stops, voiced fricatives
all but glides, vowels, and laryngeals (h, ?)
As well as three places of articulation:
coronal, dorsal, labial
Some other important features:
[sonorant]
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nasals, liquids, glides, vowels
[high]
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dorsal consonants, some vowels
References
Anisfeld, M., J. Barlow, and C. Frail. 1968. Distinctive features in the pluralization rules of English speakers. Language and Speech 11:31-37.
Bedoin, Nathalie. 1998. Phonetic features activation in visual word recognition: The case of voicing. Xth Congress of the European Society for Cognitive
Psychology (ESCOP X), Jerusalem.
Bedoin Nathalie. 2003. Sensitivity to voicing similarity in printed stimuli: effect of a training programme in dyslexic children. Journal of Phonetics 31.3:541-546.
Berent, Iris & Charles Perfetti. 1995. A rose is a REEZ: The two-cycles model of phonology assembly in reading English. Psychological Review 102:146-184.
Buchwald, Adam and Brenda Rapp. [forthcoming]. Consonants and vowels in orthographic representations. Cognitive Neuropsychology 1–30.
Caramazza, Alfonso, G. Miceli, & D. Chialant. 2000. Separable processing of consonants and vowels. Nature 403:428-30.
Cotelli, Maria, Jubin Abutalebi, Marco Zorzi, and Stefano Cappa. 2003. Vowels in the buffer: a case study of acquired dysgraphia with selective vowel
substitutions. Cognitive Neuropsychology 20.2:99–114.
Ferreres, A., C. Lopez, and N. China. 2003. Phonological alexia with vowel-consonant dissociation in non-word reading. Brain and Language 84.3:399-413.
Fromkin, Victoria. 1971. The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances. Language 47.1:27-52.
Hu, Chieh Fang and Hugh Catts. 1993. Phonological recoding as a universal process? Evidence from beginning readers of Chinese. Reading and Writing
5.3:325-337.
Jaeger, Jeri. 1992. Phonetic features in young children’s slips of the tongue. Language and Speech 35.1-2:189-205.
Jakobson, Roman, Serge Karcevsky and Nikolaj Trubetzkoy. 1928. Quelles sont les méthodes les mieux appropriés à un exposé complet et pratique d’une
langue quelconque? Reprinted in Jakobson 1971, pp. 3-6.
Jusczyk, Peter, Mara Goodman, and Angela Baumann. 1999. Nine-month-olds’ attention to sound similarities in syllables. Journal of Memory & Language
40:62-82.
Krifi, Sonia, Nathalie Bedoin, and A. Mérigot. 2003. Effects of Voicing Similarity Between Consonants in Printed Stimuli in Normal and Dyslexic Readers. Current
Psychology Letters 10.1.
Lukatela, G., T. Eaton, C. Lee, and M. Turvey. 2001. Does visual word identification involve a sub-phonemic level? Cognition 78.3:B41-52.
Obleser, Jonas, Aditi Lahiri, & Carsten Eulitz. 2004. Magnetic Brain Response Mirrors Extraction of Phonological Features from Spoken Vowels. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience 16:31-39.
Phillips, Colin, Tom Pellathy, and Alec Marantz. 2000. Phonological Feature Representations in Auditory Cortex.
Pycha, Anne, Pawel Novak, Ryan Shosted, and Eurie Shin. 2003. Phonological rule-learning and its implications for a theory of vowel harmony. In Proceedings
of WCCFL 22, Gina Garding and Mimu Tsujimura, eds., 423-435.
Stevens, Kenneth. 2003. Acoustic and perceptual evidence for universal phonological features. Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Phonetic
Sciences, Barcelona, 33-38.
Vaux, Bert. 2006. The role of features in a symbolic theory of phonology. In Contemporary views on architecture and representations in phonological theory, Eric
Raimy and Charles Cairns, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Žagar, Linda and John Locke. 1986. The Psychological Reality of Phonetic Features in Children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 17:56-62.
Conditioned Head Turn
drumming bear
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Infant ( 0;6) hears
constant background
stimulus, e.g. [ba], and
target, e.g. [pa]
Conditioned to turn
head only to target set,
not background set
(correct response
reinforced by flashing
lights, drumming bears)
Glossary
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Manner features
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[continuant], [nasal], [strident], [lateral], and
(according to some, not including me)
[approximant]