Individual speakers' speech patterns differ from one another, despite presumably similar language input. What are the sources of this individual variability? In this dissertation, I explore sources of individual differences in pronunciation of coronal obstruents (/s/, /t[superscript h]/, /c[superscript h]/, /c/) at the ends of nouns in Korean.…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained as…

This dissertation examines the development of the internal structure of the Korean syllable by adult Korean learners whose native language is English. Prior research has identified the prominence of the body constituent in Korean and the rime constituent in English. The current study focuses on the acquisition of the body unit by English speakers…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

Research attempting to understand the intermediate stages of first-language acquisition and disordered speech has led to the discovery of covert contrast. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable difference between phonemes that is produced by a language learner, but in a way that cannot be heard readily by a listener of the target language.…

This dissertation examines the question of how phonological alternations are learnt. In constraint-based models of phonological learning, it is hypothesized that prior learning of phonotactics from the lexicon facilitates the learning of alternations. While this is an influential assumption, the empirical evidence for it is equivocal. In this…

This year's conference theme, "Be Seen, Be Heard," reflected not only our goal of celebrating our achievements but also represented our intent of making sure everyone's voices are heard, especially during 2017's difficult political climate. The conference opened with a motivating address from Dean Laura E. Lyons, followed by an…

We present findings of an investigation into the acquisition of the English /s/-/esh/ contrast by native speakers of Korean and Japanese. Both of these languages have the phones [s] and [esh], and both languages exhibit a pattern--or motivate a rule--whereby /s/ is realized as [esh] before the vowel [i] and the glide [j]--that is, high front…

North Kyungsang Korean (NKK) is a pitch accent language in which each word has one of a restricted set of possible tonal patterns, and where the tonal pattern of a given lexical word is not fully predictable. This dissertation reports on a corpus study of accent patterns in existing words and the results of a study in which NKK speakers were asked…

The phonetics and phonology of the Kyungsang dialect of Korean is distinct from those of the standard Seoul dialect with regard to segments and lexical pitch. However, whether the distinctive phonetics and phonology of Kyungsang Korean are maintained by younger speakers is questionable due to the increased exposure to Seoul Korean and the…

This dissertation addresses the extent to which linguistic behavior can be described in terms of the projection of patterns from existing lexical items, through an investigation of Korean reduplication. Korean has a productive pattern of reduplication in which a consonant is inserted in a vowel-initial base, illustrated by forms such as "alok"--"t…

The effects of age of acquisition and native language prosody on the acquisition of English stress patterns were investigated with early and late Korean-English bilinguals (n = 20). Distributional patterns of stress placement based on syllabic structure, distributional patterns of stress placement based on lexical class, and stress patterns of…

Papers in various aspects of phonological research and theory include: "One-Step Raising in Gbanu" (Mary Bradshaw); "ATR Harmony in Konni" (Mike Cahill); "Prosodic Structure in SiSwati" (Rebecca Herman); "The Deletion of /w/ in Seoul Korean and Its Implications" (Hyeon-Seok Kang); "Tense, Aspect, and…

Papers on phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics from a conference on formal linguistics include: "Major Class Alternations" (Young-Mee Yu Cho, S. Inkelas); "On Defining Complex Templates (R. Kager); "Sandhi and Syllables in Classical Sanskrit" (B. Kessler); "Catalexis in Word Stress: Evidence from Spanish and…

Papers in phonology, psycholinguistics, and syntax include: "Discriminating between Syntactic and Semantic Processing: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials" (Kim Ainsworth-Darnell); "The Syntactic Structure of Chinese Formal Focus" (Qian Gao); "Employing a Multimodal Logic in an Approach to German Pronoun Fronting"…