Languages that have complex syllable patterns also share linguistic features with each other. These features can be identified through diachronic paths developed by these syllable patterns this study aimed to show the universality of syllabemes in Kazakh and other languages, focusing on questions like evolution of syllables in the Turkic…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

The concept of an output-driven map formally characterizes an intuitive notion about phonology: that disparities between the input and the output are introduced only to the extent necessary to satisfy restrictions on outputs. When all of the grammars definable in a phonological system are output-driven, the implied structure provides significant…

The purpose of this meta-synthesis is to formulate a hypothesis concerning the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition for typically developed Arabic readers. I propose that the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition varies as a function of grade level, stimuli frequency, and text affiliation. Stimuli…

The paper examines the preverbal markers in Mengrelian as the possible loci of post-syntactic phonological rules that affect the allomorphy of these preverbs. The goal of the paper is to pinpoint the series of these rules and the extent to which the final form of the derived material changes as a result of their application. The phonological rules…

Various explanations have been put forth for the asymmetrical acquisition of tense and aspect morphology across categories of lexical aspect. This experiment tested the adequacy of a subset of such accounts by examining English native speakers' (n = 40) use of progressive and past tense morphology within activity and accomplishment verb frames…

To test between two recent accounts of the early stages in the acquisition of negation, we conducted an elicited production study with 25 children, between 2;05 and 3;04 (mean 2;11). The experimental study produced a robust set of negative sentences, with considerable individual variation. Although 13 of the child participants mainly produced…

One of the most challenging, but rather interesting, topics in the literature of Arabic phonology and morphology is the broken plurals (BP). The most widely acceptable account of Arabic BP, as far as I know, is McCarthy (1982) within the framework of Autosegmental Phonology. This paper presents and discusses the model of McCarthy (1982) and shows…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

The chief concern of this dissertation is to investigate a fundamental, yet unsolved problem within the phonology of Proto-Indo-European (PIE): the process of syllabification. I show that by analyzing the much more easily reconstructable word-edge clusters we may predict which types of consonant clusters can occur word-medially, provided that we…

The present article examines the effect of variable input on the acquisition of plural morphology in two varieties of Spanish: Chilean Spanish, where the plural marker is sometimes omitted due to a phonological process of syllable final /s/ lenition, and Mexican Spanish (of Mexico City), with no such lenition process. The goal of the study is to…

This dissertation describes the segments and tones of Soyaltepec Mazatec, an Oto-Manguean language of southern Mexico virtually undescribed in the literature with the exception of Pike (1956). The preliminary work done by Pike and subsequent analyses by Goldsmith (1990) and Pizer (1994) are reviewed giving evidence that the system is complex and…

This article provides experimental evidence for the claim in Hayes (2004) and McCarthy (1998) that language learners are biased to assume that morphological paradigms should be phonologically-uniform--that is, that derived words should retain all the phonological properties of their bases. The evidence comes from an artificial language…