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There is an active debate within the field of phonology concerning the cognitive status of substantive phonetic factors such as ease of articulation and perceptual distinctiveness. A new framework is proposed in which substance acts as a bias, or prior, on phonological learning. Two experiments tested this framework with a method in which participants are first provided highly impoverished evidence of a new phonological pattern, and then tested on how they extend this pattern to novel contexts and novel sounds. Participants were found to generalize velar palatalization (e.g., the change from [k]asinkeep to [t�ʃ]asincheap) in a way that accords with linguistic typology, and that is predicted by a cognitive bias in favor of changes that relate perceptually similar sounds. Velar palatalization was extended from the mid front vowel context (i.e., before [e]asincape) to the high front vowel context (i.e., before [i]asin keep), but not vice versa. The key explanatory notion of perceptual similarity is quantified with a psychological model of categorization, and the substantively biased framework is formalized as a conditional random field. Implications of these results for the debate on substance, theories of phonological generalization, and the formalization of similarity are discussed.

Co-occurrence restrictions on word-initial consonant clusters are traditionally viewed as a consequence of the relative sonority of both members of the CC. In the first part of this paper, I aim to show that the reasoning underlying this approach is circular. The observation that sonority does increase in word-initial clusters is relabelled explanation in saying that sonority must increase. Since the crucial part of this circular argumentation is expressed by a constraint (“sonority must increase within word-initial clusters”), I address the more general issue of constraints in linguistic theory. In the second part of the paper, I propose a constraint-free theory where restrictions on word-initial clusters follow from the interaction of more general principles. The main principles I draw on are Government-Licensing (Charette, 1990), segmental complexity (Harris, 1990) and a strict CVCV syllable-structure (Lowenstamm, 1996). None of these devices makes special reference to wordinitial clusters. Since word-initial restrictions crucially depend on idiosyncratic properties of the consonants involved, I also investigate the internal structure of consonants. In the representations I introduce, the set of observations commonly subsumed under the label sonority is assigned no phonological status. Rather, it is shown to be a function of known phonological primitives. Finally, a

respectively, "*(it) seemed the dog to bark", where each verb takes its own selected subject, and na:tural, with the same sound structure of na:ture, plus al. The question in each case is what causes the observed distortions which, as it turns out, are themselves regularities of the language ("raising", and "trisyllabic shortening", respectively). The answer in each case could in principle be either: (i) Representational constraints on the larger units (phrases or words) that prevent achievement of the strict compositionality; or: (ii) Transformational operations that take the result of strict compositionality as their input and produce the observed structures as their output. In the 60's, (ii) was uniformly taken to be the right answer, both in syntax and phonology. But at that time, the mere discovery of formally statable regularities was a considerable achievement in itself, and that success understandably obscured the important empirical issue of choosing between (i) and (ii) that

Abstract not found

Many languages respect the generalization that some or all unstressed vowels are deleted. This generalization proves elusive in classic Optimality Theory, however. The source of the problem is classic OT’s parallel evaluation, which requires that the effects of stress assignment and syncope be optimized together. This article argues for a version of OT called Harmonic Serialism, in which the effects of stress assignment and syncope can and must be evaluated sequentially. The results are potentially applicable to other domains where process interaction is best understood in derivational terms.

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eingereicht an der Universität Wien Wien, 2006On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d’abord et longtemps, tout rivage. (“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”) — André Gide2.3.1 Elements.......................... 62 2.3.2 Structure: the basics................... 62 2.3.3 Nasals and l........................ 85

Abstract not found

Recent work has argued that phonology includes grammatical principles and representations that refer to the temporal coordination of gestures (Gafos 2001, 2002). In this paper, we extend this line of work by arguing that the distribution of phonetically long consonants in English derives from general