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…

Borrowing and its implications for Turkish phonology is examined, focusing on words with initial and final consonant clusters. A brief summary of the relevant portions of Turkish phonology is presented. A formulation of the rules of lateral conditioning and velar conditioning is shown to successfully account for almost all the relevant borrowing…

This study analyzed the pronunciation of English interdental fricatives by two native speakers of Turkish, focusing on whether there was systematic variation of forms according to the kind of discourse and the surrounding phonemes. Subjects were two adult Turkish learners of English as a Second Language, both of whom had been in the United States…

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…

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother-child dyads each) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignments of words to lexical and functional item categories. Results show that sets of distributional, phonological, and acoustic cues distinguishing lexical and functional items are…

A variety of types of evidence are examined to help determine the true nature of "deep structure" and what, if any, implications this has for linguistic theory as well as culture theory generally. The evidence accumulated over the past century on the nature of phonetic and phonemic systems is briefly discussed, and the following areas of…

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…