Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.* The generative paradigm of language description (Chomsky 1964, 1965, Chomsky & Halle 1968) has dominated linguistic thinking in the United States for many years. Its specific claims about the phonetic basis of linguistic analysis still provide the cornerstone of most linguistic research. Many criticisms have been raised against the phonetic claims of the Sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968), some from early on

This Carnegie Symposium celebrates a growing convergence of behavioral and neural approaches to the mechanisms of cognitive change and reflects an overall convergence of behavioral and neural approaches to all aspects of cognition and cognitive development. This article is a part of a corresponding convergence in my own research. In my own formative years as a psychologist, facts about underlying neural mechanisms were considered to be nearly irrelevant to understanding cognition and its development. Where I went to graduate school we studied cognition and cognitive development on the one hand and physiological psychology on the other, and they seemed almost completely disconnected subjects. My own early experimental work stayed strictly on the cognitive side of this huge divide. Things began to change for me in the late 1970’s, with the emergence of connectionist models. They seemed to many of us who were involved in their development to represent a clear step toward bridging the gap between mind and brain (Hinton & Anderson, 1981). We saw information processing as arising from the interactions of vast numbers of neurons. We began to think of propagation of activation among neurons via their synaptic connections as producing cognitive outcomes ranging from perception to comprehension to problem solving, and we thought of changes in the

If first language is rational in the sense that acquisition produces an end-state model of language that is a proper reflection of input and that optimally prepares speakers for comprehension and production, second language is usually not. This paper considers the apparent irrationalities of L2 acquisition, that is the shortcomings where input fails to become intake. It describes how ‘learned attention’, a key concept in contemporary associative and connectionist theories of animal and human learning, explains these effects. The fragile features of L2 acquisition are those which, however available as a result of frequency, recency, or context, fall short of intake because of one of the factors of contingency, cue competition, salience, interference, overshadowing, blocking, or perceptual learning, which are all shaped by the L1. Each phenomenon is explained within associative learning theory and exemplified in language learning. Paradoxically, the successes of L1 acquisition and the limitations of L2 acquisition both derive from the same basic learning principles.

understanding

A series of arguments is presented showing that words are not stored in memory in a way that resembles the abstract, phonological code used by alphabetical orthographies or by linguistic analysis. Words are stored in a very concrete, detailed auditory code that includes nonlinguistic information including speaker’s voice properties and other details. Thus, memory for language resembles an exemplar memory and abstract descriptions (using letter-like units and speaker-invariant features) are probably computed on the fly whenever needed. One consequence of this hypothesis is that the study of phonology should be the study of generalizations across the speech of a community and that such a description will employ units (segments, syllable types, prosodic patterns, etc.) that are not necessarily employed as units in speakers’ memory for language. That is, the psychological units of language are not useful for description of linguistic generalizations and linguistic generalizations across a community are not useful for storing the language for speaker use.

The current emphasis in second language teaching lies in the achievement of communicative effectiveness. In line with this approach, pronunciation training is nowadays geared towards helping learners avoid serious pronunciation errors, rather than eradicating the finest traces of foreign accent. However, to devise optimal pronunciation training programmes, systematic information on these pronunciation problems is needed, especially in the case of the development of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training systems. The research reported on in this paper is aimed at obtaining systematic information on segmental pronunciation errors made by learners of Dutch with different mother tongues. In particular, we aimed at identifying errors that are frequent, perceptually salient, persistent, and potentially hampering to communication. To achieve this goal we conducted analyses on different corpora of speech produced by L2 learners under different conditions. This resulted in a robust inventory of pronunciation errors that can be used for designing efficient pronunciation training programs.

this article was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (LIS-9720348), the National Institute of Mental Health (MH47566), and the J. S. McDonnell Foundation (9634) . We thank Helen Neville for asking the question that led to the Hebbian formulation of the basis of the stabilization of speech representations and Susan E. Holmes for helpful input in the early formation of this research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to J. L. McClelland, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, 115 Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (e-mail: jlm@cnbc. cmu.edu)

3. Speech and meters 4. Further problems with the alphabetic model of language 5. Two levels of complex system 6. Language as a social institution

Student modeling is of great importance in intelligent tutoring and intelligent educational assessment applications. However, student modeling for computer-assisted language learning (CALL) applications differs from classic student modeling in several key ways, including the lack of observable intermediate steps (behavioral or cognitive) involved in successful performance. This

linguistica. Il caso della prosodia 69 Valentina Caniparoli, The role of rhythmic and distributional cues in speech recognition 85 Olga M. Manfrellotti, The role of literacy in the recognition of phonological units 99 Sarah Hawkins & Rachel Smith, Polysp: a polysystemic, phonetically-rich approach to speech understandingDirettore/Editor: Pier Marco Bertinetto (Pisa, SNS).