This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

Cross-linguistically, languages allow a wider variety of phonotactic patterns in onsets than in codas. However, the variability of phonotactic patterns in coda position in different languages suggests these patterns must, at least in part, be learned. Two experiments were conducted to explore whether there is an asymmetry in English-learning…

Revised version of a paper delivered at the Second Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Gainesville, Florida, October 30 - November 1, 1969. (VM)

The history of Slavic prosody gives an account of Slavic languages at the time of their differentiation and relates these developments to issues in phonological theory. It is first argued that the syllable structure of Slavic changes before the fall of the jers and suggests that intra- and intersyllabic reorganization in Late Common Slavic was far…

Demonstrates that both syllables and vowels are carriers of word stress. With the postulation of stronger activation flow between syllables and V-units and weaker activation between syllables and C-units, it is possible to unambiguously associate stress with the syllable and to explain the differential sensitivity of consonants and vowels to…

Proposes a theory of stress patterns in English phonology based on the role of rhythm, or alternating weak and strong syllables, in determining stress shifts in words. (AM)

The paper presents a set of linguistic phenomena illustrative of the notion "universal tendency". Linguistic generalizations are regarded here not as isolated, "true-or-false" propositions but as embedded in a hierarchy of competing forces. An "exception" to a universal is thus seen as the result of the prevalence of another conflicting universal…

A particular aspect of syllable structure, length of syllable margins, was investigated with the aid of a Markov chain model. The model represented explicitly the dynamic relationship between types of syllable structure and the historical processes that affect them. It is proposed that the regularities concerning syllable types (universality of CV…

To determine what psycholinguistic evidence (or external evidence) such as slips of the tongue, monosyllabic word blends, and novel word games reveals about syllable structure, this study focused on psycholinguistic research on the English and German syllable. English and German provide a good testing ground for evaluation of external evidence…

Revised version of a paper delivered at the 5th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Language and Linguistic Studies, Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 20-21, 1972. Assistance provided through a Summer Faculty Fellowship, University of California, San Diego, and the Phonology Laboratory at Berkeley (supported in part by a National Science…

Patterns of plural selection in Armenian suggest that lexical representations of morphemes must include predictable syllabic structure, contrary to most theories of phonology, and that some phonological rules such as syllabification may precede morphological rules, contrary to the theory of distributed morphology. Furthermore, certain segments at…

This paper attempts to show that traditional generative phonology as formulated by Chomsky and Halle (1968) fails to account for the optional dropping of the schwa in French, and attempts to formulate a theory which can account for this phenomenon. The crucial factor governing the schwa-dropping process is the number of consonants preceding the…

This articles discusses intonation in terms of different kinds of contours and demonstrates the inadequacy of any approach to English intonation which treats contours as sequences of significant pitch levels. (NCR)

Revised version of a paper published in the "Edinburgh Working Papers in Linguistics," n1. (DD)