This paper attempts to prove that King's (1973) hypothesis of a distinction between the phonological and the phonetic level, if it exists, is not as intuitively recognizable as he indicates. Two rules which King maintains are phonetic (one relating to regressive assimilation, the other to velar anteriorization) are shown not to correspond to his…

Investigates factors which condition deletion of plural /s/ in Peruvian Spanish. There is more /s/ deletion in plural forms than in monomorphemic forms. But 1,304 examples of plural /s/ from informal interviews with native speakers of Peruvian Spanish show plural marker tends to be retained when ambiguity would otherwise result. (Author/LMO)

To account for vowel alternations in forms such as divine-divinity, Chomsky and Halle propose the Vowel Shift Rule and other rules. This study experimentally assesses the psychological validity and generality of these rules by testing the productivity of vowel alternation. Subjects were required, in a meaningful sentence context, to produce a…

Translation may be compared to a cable composed of many simultaneous strands of transfer. In translation, there is replacement which involves general hierarchical organization, grammatical constructions and constituents, mapping of deep onto surface structures, classes, ordering, lexicon, phonology, concordance, points of ambiguity, and…

Presents two models of language acquisition: one postulating articulatory learning of underlying adult forms and the other both articulatory and perceptual learning. Reanalyzes the first model's data and concludes that two types of phonological rules are recognizable: perceptual-encoding rules and output (articulatory) rules. Identifies properties…

Weakening and deletion of syllable-final and word-final phonemes, a phenomenon prevalant in Puerto Rican Spanish, was studied. Two of these phonemes, /s#/ and /n#/ were examined for their capacity as plural markers. Data were collected during a one-year ethnographically-oriented study of a single block in the Puerto Rican community in north…

Sound-meaning correspondences produced by an infant were studied under conditions of early rampant homonymy (i.e., production by a very young child of a small set of noncontrastive surface forms or phonetic sequences to refer to objects/events that on the basis of adult standards require the production of numerous contrasting surface forms). The…

The Spanish feminine article /el/, ordinarily the singular masculine definite article, has been used as evidence of the need for obligatory disagreement rules. Others explain the anamoly by means of referral rules. A third solution is suggested: an allomorphy rule which can be interpreted syntactically or phonologically. (LMO)

Standard manuals of Spanish pronunciation recognize that both [+continuant] and [-continuant] surface variants occur for the voiced obstruents/bdg/. Within generative phonology, it has been assumed that the systematic phonemic representation for these voiced obstruents should be [-continuant] /bdg/, with a rule of spirantization converting these…

This paper examines the status of surface structure in transformational grammar, and the way that surface structure mediates the contacts between the phonological and semantic components of the grammar. Surface structure refers not to a single but to at least four distinct notions that do not necessarily define a homogeneous level of…

This paper attempts to show that the theory of phonological rule reordering is not plausible, and that any argument which attempts to use reordering to refute the theory of intrinsic ordering is inadmissible. King's (1973) arguments against intrinsic ordering are based on the theory that two reordering rules operate in phonological processes.…

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

Investigates the role of morphological structure in the representation and processing of Mandarin Chinese compounds. Results provide evidence against single-layer, morpheme-based models of the Chinese mental lexicon, pointing instead to a two-layer, whole-word and morphemic model (the Multi-Level Cluster Representation Model). (67 references)…

A project designed to gather information about similarities and differences that may be important for teaching English to Finnish learners, and, to a certain extent, for teaching Finnish through English, was conducted through a systematic comparison of the two languages and an analysis of instances where the two languages come into contact. In the…

This paper examines certain of the cues to surface constituency that are salient to children in the comprehension of syntactic structure. Accessibility is studied through a set of experiments requiring seven-year-old children to repeat certain syntactic constituents. These children can correctly identify subjects and also predicate phrases with…