One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

In this paper we analyzed some of the phonological rules of Russian loanword adaptation in Persian, on the view of Optimal Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). It is the first study of phonological process on Russian loanwords adaptation in Persian. By gathering about 50 current Russian loanwords, we selected some of them to analyze. We…

This paper documents the acoustic reflexes of ATR harmony in Kinande followed by an analysis of the dominance reversal found in class 5 nominals. The principal findings are that the ATR harmony is reliably reflected in a lowering of the first formant. Depending on the vowel, ATR harmony also affects the second formant. The directional asymmetry…

This article describes in detail several explicit computational methods for approaching such questions in phonology as the vowel/consonant distinction, the nature of vowel harmony systems, and syllable structure, appealing solely to distributional information. Beginning with the vowel/consonant distinction, we consider a method for its discovery…

This study investigated how Japanese-speaking learners of English pronounce the three point vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/ appearing in the first and second monosyllabic words of English noun phrases, and the schwa /[image omitted]/ appearing in English disyllabic words. First and second formant (F1 and F2) values were measured for four Japanese…

The sixteen articles on prosodic analysis collected here were written by members of the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, between the years 1948 and 1961. In 1948, Professor Firth, then head of the department, published his paper "Sounds and Prosodies," in which he launched the new…

This collection of eight papers and six "data squibs" (short research findings) are based on topics and languages under study by students and staff of the linguistics program of the University of North Dakota. The papers are: (1) "Dakota Sioux Objects" (Thomas M. Pinson); (2) "The Tapir: A Yanomami Text" (Irma…

Papers in this volume on contrastive linguistics include the following: "Auxiliaries in English and Danish" (Niels Davidsen-Nielsen); "On Tongue Twisters" (Wlodzimierz Sobkowiak); "On Derivational and Phrasal Adverbials of Manner" (James L. Wyatt); "Scrambling and the Polish Word Order. An Alternative Hypothesis" (Przemyslaw Tajsner); "Verbs of…