One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

Acoustic and perceptual studies investgate B2-level Polish learners' acquisition of second language (L2) English word-boundaries involving word-initial vowels. In production, participants were less likely to produce glottalization of phrase-medial initial vowels in L2 English than in first language (L1) Polish. Perception studies employing word…

The Phonological Permeability Hypothesis (PPH, Cabrelli Amaro & Rothman, 2010) attempts to reconcile evidence suggesting some L2 learners, however rare, attain native-like L2 phonological systems with the observation that most do not. Considering existing L2 phonology research, it is not clear that phonological differences between early and…

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a…

Replicating research originally performed with native speakers of English, this study investigated the mutability of vowels in Spanish. The study was based on the theory that when presented with non-words, native speakers are more likely to change the vowel than the consonant to arrive at an existing lexical item. It was hypothesized that if…

An investigation, analyzing the linking of skeleton and syntactical rules of Madurese, presents counterevidence to Marantz's claims about the nature of reduplication, and to Carrier-Duncan's claim that reduplication must precede all phonological rules. It is proposed that reduplication in Madurese is not affixation, as Marantz claims, and can be…

Explores the role of sonority in constraining the word identification errors of normal listeners by examining the phonological relationships between response errors and stimulus targets. Findings indicate that sonority and lexical phonostatistics may constrain coda-driven word-search processes. (35 references) (Author/CK)

Reports of research in phonetics and psycholinguistics include: "Interaction with Autonomy: Defining Multiple Output Models in Psycholinguistic Theories" (Julie E. Boland, Anne Cutler); "Vocal Tract Evolution and Vowel Production" (K. Bretonnel Cohen); "Final Lowering in Kipare" (Rebecca Herman); "Gestural…