It has generally been assumed that after nonlow vowels in English, hiatus is resolved by inserting a homorganic glide (e.g. seeing [sijip], Itô & Mester 2009). However, despite suspicions that inserted glides may be fundamentally different from lexical glides (e.g. Cruttenden 2008), a systematic phonetic investigation of the purported glide is lacking. We examine the nature of hiatus resolution by comparing three environments: (i) vowel-vowel sequences within words (VV: kiosk), (ii) vowel-vowel sequences across word boundaries (VBV: see otters), and (iii) vowel-glide-vowel sequences across word boundaries (VGV: see yachts). The first finding is that a glottal stop produced between the vowels accounts for nearly half of the responses for VBV phrases, whereas glottal stops are present in less than 5% of the VV and the VGV conditions. Second, an acoustic comparison of VV, VBV, and VGV phrases not produced with glottal stops shows significant differences between the vowel-glide-vowel and the vowel-vowel sequences on all measures, including duration, intensity, and formants. These results indicate that American English speakers tend to resolve hiatus at word boundaries with glottal stop insertion, whereas there is no hiatus resolution at all within words. A brief optimality-theoretic analysis sketches out the phonological differences between hiatus at word boundaries and word-medially.

Jasmine was an American seventh grader whose first language (L1) is Punjabi and second language (L2) is English. A good speller, she tied for first place at her regional spelling bee. She maintains that she then correctly spelled the tie-breaking word: tomography. After requesting an instant video replay of her word, the judges declared Jasmine's spelling incorrect: <d-o-m-o-g-r-a-p-h-y>. We examine three questions: Is Jasmine's presumed-high word-recognition ability consistent with such an error? Did her L1 interfere with her L2 pronunciation? Did an L1-influenced pronunciation cause the judges to perceive her word-initial /t/ as [d]? After inquiring of Jasmine about the spelling event itself, we examined the considerable research on Indian English, spelling, speech production, and speech perception; we also audio-recorded Jasmine's spoken language at various style levels to assess the degree to which Punjabi may be influencing her English pronunciation. The first question remains without a confirmed answer, though our assumption is that it is ‘no’. Work on Indian English indicates a probable ‘yes’ to the latter two questions. Spectrographic analysis of Jasmine's word-initial English [th]-sounds demonstrates the shorter voice onset times associated with the nonaspirated /t/-sounds of Punjabi and Indian English. It is probable that Jasmine pronounced the ‘t’ [th] of tomography with little or no aspiration, and that the judges heard the near-unaspirated [t] as a [d]. Jasmine's experience demonstrates that the Scripps National Spelling Bee's sole reliance on dictionary pronunciations of Standard American English might well be adjusted to accommodate contestants who speak a nonstandard, or a standard but non-American, variety of English.

Two explanations are offered in the literature for the origin of lexical patterns of consonantal voicing cooccurrence: (i) speaker-oriented: a cooccurrence pattern may result from voicing assimilation under ease-of-articulation pressures, and (ii) listener-oriented: a cooccurrence pattern may result from systematic misperception by listeners. This article argues for a third possible origin of such patterns: (iii) lexical accumulation: a series of unrelated sound changes may conspire to create a lexical pattern of voicing cooccurrence. Once introduced into the lexicon of some language through any of these three routes, speakers can elevate such a pattern to a grammatical principle. A new voicing cooccurrence pattern in Afrikaans is presented as an example of a pattern that arose via this third route of lexical accumulation. Evidence is also presented that this pattern is being learned as a grammatical constraint by Afrikaans speakers.

Approximative numbers, like paucal and greater plural, can be characterized in terms of a feature, [±additive], concerned with additive closure. The two parameters affecting this feature (whether it is active and whether + and - values may cooccur) also affect the two features that generate nonapproximative numbers. All three features are shown to be derivative of concepts in the literature on aspect and telicity, to have a straightforwardly compositional semantics, and to eschew ad hoc stipulations on cooccurrence (such as geometries and filters). Thus, what is proposed is a general theory of number, free of extrinsic stipulations. Empirically, the theory yields a characterization of all numbers attested crosslinguistically, a combinatorial explanation of Greenberg-style implications affecting their cooccurrence, a natural account of morphological compositionality, and insight into their diachronic sources and trajectories.

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, language management has been a central activity of the party and government, interrupted during the years of the Cultural Revolution. It has focused on the spread of Putonghua as a national language, the simplification of the script, and the auxiliary use of Pinyin. Associated has been a policy of modernization and terminological development. There have been studies of bilingualism and topolects (regional varieties like Cantonese and Hokkien) and some recognition and varied implementation of the needs of non-Han minority languages and dialects, including script development and modernization. Asserting the status of Chinese in a globalizing world, a major campaign of language diffusion has led to the establishment of Confucius Institutes all over the world. Within China, there have been significant efforts in foreign language education, at first stressing Russian but now covering a wide range of languages, though with a growing emphasis on English. Despite the size of the country, the complexity of its language situations, and the tension between competing goals, there has been progress with these language-management tasks. At the same time, nonlinguistic forces have shown even more substantial results. Computers are adding to the challenge of maintaining even the simplified character writing system. As even more striking evidence of the effect of politics and demography on language policy, the enormous internal rural-to-urban rate of migration promises to have more influence on weakening regional and minority varieties than campaigns to spread Putonghua. Overall, linguists and a strongly developed cadre of sociolinguists have played a useful role, but the driving force has been the Communist leadership.

The distribution of the raised variants of the Canadian English diphthongs is standardly analyzed as opaque allophony, with derivationally ordered processes of diphthong raising and of/t/- flapping. This short report provides an alternative positional contrast analysis in which the preflap raised diphthongs are licensed by a language-specific constraint. The basic distributional facts are captured with a weighted constraint grammar that lacks the intermediate level of representation of the standard analysis. The paper also provides a proposal for how the constraints are learned and shows how correct weights can be found with a simple, widely used learning algorithm.

In many different domains of language acquisition, there exists an apparent learnability problem to which innate knowledge of some aspect of Universal Grammar (UG) has been proposed as a solution. The present article reviews these proposals in the core domains of (i) identifying syntactic categories, (ii) acquiring basic morphosyntax, (iii) structure dependence, (iv) subjacency, and (v) the binding principles. We conclude that, in each of these domains, the innate UG-specified knowledge posited does not, in fact, simplify the task facing the learner.

Parents of small deaf children need guidance on constructing home and school environments that affect normal language acquisition. They often turn to physicians and spiritual leaders and, increasingly, the internet. These sources can be underinformed about crucial issues, such as matters of brain plasticity connected to the risk of linguistic deprivation, and delay or disruption in the development of cognitive skills interwoven with linguistic ability. We have formed a team of specialists in education, linguistics, pediatric medicine, and psychology, and at times specialists in theology and in law have joined our group. We argue that deaf children should be taught a sign language in the early years. This does not preclude oral-aural training and assistive technology. With a strong first language (a sign language), the child can become bilingual (with the written form of the ambient spoken language and, perhaps, the spoken form), accruing the benefits of bilingualism. We have published in medical journals, addressing primary care physicians, in a journal with a spiritual-leader readership, and in a health-law journal. Articles in progress address medical educators and practitioners. Team members present findings at conferences, work on lobbying and legislative efforts with the National Association of the Deaf, and spread the word at conferences of target audiences. We share our work in Word format, so that anyone can easily appropriate it for our common interests. One of our articles has been downloaded over 27,000 times (as of April 2014), and we are asked to consult with committees in other countries as they draft national policies.

Levinson 2013 (L13) argues against the idea that ‘recursion, and especially recursive center embedding, might be the core domain-specific property of language’ (p. 159), citing crosslinguistic grammatical data and specific corpus studies. L13 offers an alternative: language inherits its recursive properties ‘from the action domain’ (p. 159). We argue that L13's claims are at best unwarranted and can in many instances be shown to be false. L13's reasoning is similarly flawed— in particular, the presumption that center-embedding can stand proxy for embedding (and clausal embedding can stand proxy for recursion). Thus, no support remains for its conclusions. Furthermore, though these conclusions are pitched as relevant to specific claims that have been published about the role of syntactic recursion, L13 misrepresents these claims. Consequently, even an empirically supported, better-reasoned version of L13 would not bear on the questions it claims to address.

This discussion note revolves around the early days of generative grammar, that is to say the late 1950s and the 1960s. Anumber of commentators have claimed that MIT linguists in this period formed an elitist in-group, talking only to each other by means of inaccessible ‘underground’ publications and thereby erecting a barrier between themselves and the outside world of linguistics. I attempt to refute such claims. We see that the early generativists used every means at their disposal at the time to diffuse their ideas: publishing single-authored books, journal articles, anthology chapters, and technical reports; aiding the writing of textbooks; giving conference talks; teaching at LSA(Linguistic Society of America) Institutes; and hosting numerous visitors to MIT. And in particular, there was no significant ‘underground’ literature to obstruct the acceptance of the new theory.

In this commentary, we focus on the linking problem Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven identify. Instead of taking a stance on the issue of universal grammar itself, we adopt an epistemological and methodological perspective on language acquisition research. We argue that the problem, linking the input to preexisting representations, constitutes just a small part of a larger methodological problem, namely how to link the input a learner receives, through a set of learning mechanisms and possibly innate representations, to the behavior the learner is producing, whether in spontaneous production or in laboratory experiments. Currently, none of the existing proposals provide an evaluated, or even a testable, account of the full process, that is, an input-output model of linguistic ontogeny. Although the focus on phenomena in isolation, probably an effect of the prevalence of the experimental method, allows the researcher some degree of control, it also distracts from the understanding of how the different mechanisms behave and interact. Our proposed solution is a more Holistic approach to the problem in which the learning mechanisms and their interaction are made fully Explicit, and in which the predicted behavior of the learner is (more) Globally evaluated. Computational modeling provides exactly the tools appropriate for this task, thereby furthering more precise and testable theories of the learning mechanisms involved.

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven could have provided a stronger argument for their conclusion, which postulated that innate universal-grammar-specified knowledge does not simplify the language learning task, had they not paid so much attention to the Chomskyan paradigm. I argue that poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments do not take into account that children are opportunistic learners employing multiple strategies, that they do not accomplish individual tasks sequentially but acquire (partial) knowledge about multiple domains simultaneously, and that they do not acquire perfect knowledge of language. Furthermore, work in formal linguistics suggests that the Chomskyan paradigm is internally incoherent and that the formalism of the Chomskyan framework lacks mathematical precision, making it difficult to evaluate its predictions. Given that linguistics ought to provide crucial input for language acquisition research, more attention needs to be paid to non-Chomskyan work in linguistics.

I completely agree with Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (AP&L) that anyone proposing a learning-strategy component needs to demonstrate precisely how that component helps solve the language acquisition task. To this end, I discuss how computational modeling is a tool well suited to doing exactly this, and that it has the added benefit of highlighting hidden assumptions underlying learning strategies. I also suggest general criteria relating to utility and usability that we can use to evaluate potential learning strategies. As a response to AP&L's request for Universal Grammar (UG) components that actually do work, I additionally provide a review of one potentially UG component that is part ofa successful learning strategy for syntactic islands, and that satisfies the evaluation criteria I propose.