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This paper examines the nature of categorical perception (CP) effects in Mandarin and Dutch adult listeners through identification and discrimination tasks using lexical tonal contrasts and through the CP index analysis. In identification tasks, Mandarin listeners identify tones in accordance with their native tonal categories whereas Dutch listeners do so based on acoustic properties. In discrimination tasks, Dutch listeners outperform Mandarin listeners especially in tonal steps on the continuum falling within the Mandarin tonal category boundary, whereas Mandarin listeners display high sensitivity in discrimination of stimuli falling across the native boundary. The CP index analysis shows a higher degree of CP in Mandarin (categorical perception) than in Dutch (psycho-acoustic perception) listeners.

Bilingual children with reduced exposure to one or both languages may have language profiles that are apparently similar to those of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Children with DLD receive enough input, but have difficulty using this input for acquisition due to processing deficits. The present investigation aims to determine aspects of adjective production that are differentially affected by reduced input (in bilingualism) and reduced intake (in DLD). Adjectives were elicited from Dutch–Russian simultaneous bilinguals with limited exposure to Russian and Russian-speaking monolinguals with and without DLD. An antonym elicitation task was used to assess the size of adjective vocabularies, and a degree task was employed to compare the preferences of the three groups in the use of morphological, lexical, and syntactic degree markers. The results revealed that adjective–noun agreement is affected to the same extent by both reduced input and reduced intake. The size of adjective lexicons is also negatively affected by both, but more so by reduced exposure. However, production of morphological degree markers and learning of semantic paradigms are areas of relative strength in which bilinguals outperform monolingual children with DLD. We suggest that reduced input might be counterbalanced by linguistic and cognitive advantages of bilingualism.

The difference in West-Germanic V(erb)-clusters, right-branching (Dutch) and left-branching (German), follows from a difference in the acquisition of V-second. The decisive factor is a rightward selection of the verbs in Dutch main clauses. That decisive factor had already been acquired before any V-cluster appeared in the child’s speech. Longitudinal Dutch child data show that modals and aspectuals develop a rightward selection that carries over into the V-cluster. The German child data do not show such a development. Automatic phrasal formation by the acquisition procedure allows a V-cluster without assuming V-to-V-movement from an underlying structure. The general perspective is that (i) the acquisition procedure is a discovery procedure, and that (ii) typological effects are the outcome of early local string-determined licensing/selection.

The current study explores how language experience may shape the correlation between lexical tone and musical pitch perception. A two domains (music and lexical tone) by two languages (tone, Mandarin Chinese and non-tone, Dutch) design is adopted. Participants were tested on their discrimination of Mandarin Chinese lexical tones, Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), and Musical Ear Test (MET). The Chinese listeners outperformed the Dutch listeners on both MBEA and MET, but had comparable accuracies for the lexical tone discrimination. Importantly, a significant cross-domain correlation was only observed for the Dutch listeners but not for the Chinese listeners. For tone language listeners, once lexical tones have been acquired, native listeners perceive them as phonological categories, and split them from other pitch variations that do not play a phonemic role. Non-tone language listeners, on the other hand, perceive both lexical tones and musical pitch on a psycho-acoustical basis, hence exhibit a unified perception of pitch across the two domains. KEYWORDS: Pitch perception, lexical tones, musical pitch, cross-domain correlation, language experience

Previous studies on children’s interpretations of PRO in adjunct clauses have found that 4- to 6-year old children exhibit non-adultlike interpretations of adjunct PRO. For sentences with adjunct control, as in John bumped Mary after PRO tripping on the sidewalk, these studies have argued that children’s knowledge is not adultlike. In this paper, we use a new task to reduce the demands involved in making a response. With this task, we find improved performance for sentences with adjunct control. These results suggest that children’s knowledge of adjunct control is adultlike, but has been obscured by the tasks used in previous studies.

This study investigated how speaker certainty (a rational cue) and speaker benevolence (an emotional cue) influence children's willingness to learn words in a selective learning paradigm. In two experiments four- to six-year-olds learnt novel labels from two speakers and, after a week, their memory for these labels was reassessed. Results demonstrated that children retained the label–object pairings for at least a week. Furthermore, children preferred to learn from certain over uncertain speakers, but they had no significant preference for nice over nasty speakers. When the cues were combined, children followed certain speakers, even if they were nasty. However, children did prefer to learn from nice and certain speakers over nasty and certain speakers. These results suggest that rational cues regarding a speaker's linguistic competence trump emotional cues regarding a speaker's affective status in word learning. However, emotional cues were found to have a subtle influence on this process.

In this paper, we will present data from both Spanish acquisition and aphasia on the Pronoun Interpretation Problem (PIP), according to which children allow pronouns to be identified with local c-commanding antecedents. Although it has recently been claimed that the PIP is, to a great extent, an experimental artifact, there are good reasons to believe that there is something “real” in the effect. As with many phenomena from acquisition, researchers have tried to explain this development in terms of “learning”, or more concretely, in terms of “parameter setting”. Children either must set the right local domain for the application of Principle B or they must set a +/− Principle B parameter. However, considering the PIP as an acquisition problem is problematic since it is difficult to see how children can converge on the target grammar without negative evidence. In this paper, we will defend an alternative approach, according to which the PIP is portrayed as the result of interplay between properties of predicates and different kinds of pronouns on the one hand, and language processing factors on the other.

The effects of bilingualism on vowel perception and cue weighting behaviour have not been established definitively. What influence does heritage bilingualism have on cue weighting of spectral and durational cues? What role does the duration cue play in cue weighting behaviour of heritage bilinguals: is it universally accessible or related to the first language? Purpose: This study examines the perception and cue weighting of child heritage bilinguals to assess whether exposure to multiple acoustic systems has an effect on cue weighting. Design: Bilinguals with a language containing a durational vowel contrast (Moroccan-Arabic) or a non-durational contrast (Turkish) were tested in order to explore cue preference and cue weighting behaviour for the multiple cued Dutch [ɑ]-[a:] contrast: their alternate first language. Data and analysis: An identification task was performed for the Dutch [ɑ] and [a:]. The F1 and F2 were logarithmically manipulated, in equal steps for the spectral and durational cue, creating a seven-step continuum. The analysis revealed cue preference by examining cue usage and relative cue weight. Conclusions: Dutch monolinguals use both cues but assign more weight to the spectral cue. Moroccan-Arabic/Dutch heritage speaker (HS) bilinguals use both cues, but weigh the spectral cue more heavily. Turkish/Dutch HS bilinguals rely almost exclusively on the spectral cue. This suggests a transfer from the alternate first language onto the perception of Dutch, regardless of language dominance. Originality: Not much research on the cue weighting behaviour of school-aged heritage bilinguals has been conducted, as this age group is yet to develop their perceptual behaviour completely. The results of this case study show an influence on perceptual behaviour as a result of bilingualism. Significance: This study provides insight into the cue weighting behaviour and cue preference of school-aged heritage bilinguals.

Previous studies have demonstrated that, for adults, differences between unaccusative verbs (e.g., “fall”) and unergative verbs (e.g., “dance”) lead to a difference in processing. However, so far we don’t know whether this effect shows up in children’s processing of these verbs as well. This study measures children’s processing of intransitive verbs using the Visual World Paradigm. We found that children differentiate in processing between unaccusative and unergative verbs, yet in a different way than adults do. We identify and discuss potential sources for this difference.

Purpose This study evaluated a newly developed quasi-universal nonword repetition task (Q-U NWRT) as a diagnostic tool for bilingual children with language impairment (LI) who have Dutch as a 2nd language. The Q-U NWRT was designed to be minimally influenced by knowledge of 1 specific language in contrast to a language-specific NWRT with which it was compared. Method One hundred twenty monolingual and bilingual children with and without LI participated (30 per group). A mixed-design analysis of variance was used to investigate the effects of LI and bilingualism on the NWRTs. Receiver operating characteristic analyses were conducted to evaluate the instruments' diagnostic value. Results Large negative effects of LI were found on both NWRTs, whereas negative effects of bilingualism only occurred on the language-specific NWRT. Both instruments had high clinical accuracy in the monolingual group, but only the Q-U NWRT had high clinical accuracy in the bilingual group. Conclusions This study indicates that the Q-U NWRT is a promising diagnostic tool to help identify LI in bilingual children learning Dutch as a 2nd language. The instrument was clinically accurate in both a monolingual and bilingual group of children and seems better able to disentangle LI from language disadvantage than more language-specific measures.

Differences between monolinguals and bilinguals are often attributed to crosslinguistic influence. This paper compares production of discourse connectives by Dutch–Russian bilinguals (Dutch-dominant), typically-developing Dutch/Russian monolinguals and Russian-speaking children with SLI. If non-target-like production in bilinguals is due to crosslinguistic influence, bilinguals should perform differently from both impaired and unimpaired monolinguals. However, if differences between bilinguals and monolinguals are due to other factors (e.g., input quantity, processing capacities), bilinguals’ language production might be similar to that of children with SLI. The results demonstrate that language dominance determines the direction of crosslinguistic influence. In terms of frequency distributions of Russian connectives across pragmatic contexts, the bilingual group performed differently from both monolingual groups and the differences were compatible with the structural properties of Dutch. However, based on error rates and types bilinguals could not be distinguished from the SLI group, suggesting that factors other than crosslinguistic influence may also be at play.

This article examines the perception of tones by non-tone-language-learning (non-tone-learning) infants between 5 and 18 months in a study that reveals infants' initial sensitivity to tonal contrasts, deterioration yet plasticity of tonal sensitivity at the end of the first year, and a perceptual rebound in the second year. Dutch infants in five age groups were tested on their ability to discriminate a tonal contrast of Mandarin Chinese as well as a contracted tonal contrast. Infants are able to discriminate tonal contrasts at 5-6 months, and their tonal sensitivity deteriorates at around 9 months. However, the sensitivity rebound sat 17-18 months. Non-tone-learning infants' tonal perception is elastic, as is shown by the influence of acoustic salience and distributional learning: (1) a salient contrast may remain discriminable throughout infancy whereas a less salient one does not; (2) a bimodal distribution in tonal exposure increases non-tone-learning infants' discrimination ability during the trough in sensitivity to tonal contrasts at 11-12 months. These novel findings reveal non-tone-learning infants' U-shaped pattern in tone perception, and display their perceptual flexibility.

Language input is a key factor in bi-/multilingual research. It roots in the definition of bi-/multilingualism and influences infant cognitive development since and even before birth. The methods used to assess language exposure among bi-/multilingual infants vary across studies. This paper discusses the parental report patterns of the amount/degree of exposure to their children and provides an algorithm-based Multilingual Infant Language Questionnaire (MILQ) targeting the amount of hours and degree of exposure an infant is exposed to each language. In the MILQ, parental feedback between general language input (languages spoken in the environment an infant resides in) and direct language exposure (languages spoken directly to an infant) are differentiated. Comparing the results drawn from general and direct perspectives, parental estimates of their children’s exposure match the general but not direct language input condition. Implications of these results are discussed.

Many languages restrict their lexicons by OCP-Place, a phonotactic constraint against co-occurrences of consonants with shared [place] (e.g., McCarthy, 1986). While many previous studies have suggested that listeners have knowledge of OCP-Place and use this for speech processing, it is less clear whether they make reference to an abstract representation of this constraint. In Dutch, OCP-Place gradiently restricts non-adjacent consonant co-occurrences in the lexicon. Focusing on labial-vowel-labial co-occurrences, we found that there are, however, exceptions from the general effect of OCP-Labial: (A) co-occurrences of identical labials are systematically less restricted than co-occurrences of homorganic labials, and (B) some specific pairs (e.g., /pVp/, /bVv/) occur more often than expected. Setting out to study whether exceptions such as (A) and (B) had an effect on processing, the current study presents an artificial language learning experiment and a reanalysis of Boll-Avetisyan and Kager's (2014) speech segmentation data. Results indicate that Dutch listeners can use both knowledge of phonotactic detail and an abstract constraint OCP-Labial as a cue for speech segmentation. We suggest that whether detailed or abstract representations are drawn on depends on the complexity of processing demands.

This paper investigates whether three-year-olds are able to process attributive adjectives (e.g., softpillow) as they hear them and to predict the noun (pillow) on the basis of the adjective meaning (soft). This was investigated in an experiment by means of the Visual World Paradigm. The participants saw two pictures (e.g., a pillow and a book) and heard adjective–noun combinations, where the adjective was either informative (e.g., soft) or uninformative (e.g., new) about the head-noun. The properties described by the target adjectives were not visually apparent. When the adjective was uninformative, the looks at the target increased only upon hearing the noun. When the adjective was informative, however, the looks at the target increased upon hearing the adjective. Three-year-olds were as fast as adult controls in predicting the upcoming noun. We conclude that toddlers process adjective–noun phrases incrementally and can predict the noun based on the prenominal adjective.

This study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types in SVO sentences. These findings show that Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds differ from their German- and Finnish-speaking peers, who show evidence of varying choice of word order to mark specific focus types, and use prosody to distinguish focus types in subject and object nouns in both SVO and OVS sentences. These comparisons suggest that typological differences in the relative importance between word order and prosody can lead to differences in children’s use of word order and prosody in unmarked and marked word orders. A more equal role of word order and prosody in the ambient language can stimulate more extensive use of prosody in the marked word order, whereas a more limited role of word order can restrict the use of prosody in the unmarked word order.

Recent metrical studies have proposed that, under certain circumstances, a weak syllable may be adjoined to a binary foot, giving rise to a minimally recursive foot. Adding to a growing body of research from metrical stress and foot-conditioned phenomena in various languages, the goals of this paper are twofold. First, we aim at providing empirical evidence for internally layered feet based on the distribution of three foot-conditioned processes of Dutch: vowel reduction, glottal stop /ʔ/ insertion and /h/ licensing/deletion. Second, we explore a less studied theoretical and descriptive advantage of internally layered feet: their potential to predict phonological strength distinctions that go beyond the traditional weak vs. strong dichotomy. In support of this view, we will argue that all three above-mentioned foot-based processes of Dutch distinguish between two types of unstressed syllables. We will demonstrate that the metrical representation that best captures this dual patterning of unstressed syllables necessitates internally layered feet.

Using a simulated telephone conversation task, we elicited sarcastic production in different utterance types (i.e. declaratives, tag questions andwh-exclamatives from native speakers of the southern variety of British English. Unlike previous studies which focus on static prosodic measurements at the utterance level (e.g. mean pitch, pitch span, intensity), we examined both static prosodic measurements and continuous changes in contour shape in the semantically most important words (or key words) of the sarcastic utterances and their counterparts in the sincere utterances. To this end, we adopted Functional Data Analysis to model pitch variation as contours and represent the contours as continuous function in statistical analysis. We found that sarcasm and sincerity are prosodically distinguishable in the key words alone. The key words in sarcastic utterances are realised with a longer duration and a flatter fall than their counterparts in sincere utterances regardless of utterance type and speaker gender. These results are compatible with previous reports on the use of a smaller pitch span and a slower speech rate in sarcastic utterances than in sincere utterances in North American English. We also observed notable differences in the use of minimum pitch, maximum pitch and contour shape in different utterance types and in the use of mean pitch and duration by male and female speakers. Additionally, we found that the prosody of the key words in sarcastic utterances and their counterparts in sincere utterances has yielded useful predictors for the presence (or absence) of sarcasm in an utterance. Together, our results lend direct support to a key-word–based approach. However, the prosodic predictors included in our analysis alone can achieve only an accuracy of 70.4%, suggesting a need to examine additional prosodic parameters and prosody beyond the key words.

Purpose: Facing previous mixed findings between monolingual and bilingual infants’ phonetic development during perceptual reorganization, the current study aims at examining the perceptual development of a native vowel contrast (/I/-/i/) by Dutch monolingual and bilingual infants. Design: We tested 390 Dutch monolingual and bilingual infants from 5 to 15 months of age through a visual habituation paradigm. Data and analysis: Mixed-effect model analyses were conducted within 320 infants, with infants’ log10 transformed looking time as the dependent variable, age (4-level) and language background (2-level) as the fixed factors, and participant and order (2-level) as the random factors. Conclusions: All infants show weak initial sensitivity to the contrast regardless of language background(s), and sensitivity improves with age. By the second half of the first year, infants discriminate the contrast, indicating the emergence of the relevant vowel categories. In addition, a perceptual lead is observed in bilingual infants, probably due to: 1) a perceptual transfer from the close-category counterpart of the other native language; 2) heightened acoustic sensitivity in bilingual infants given their rich linguistic experience; and 3) a general bilingual cognitive advantage. The influences of contrast salience and bilingualism on language development are discussed. Originality: Overall, these findings constitute an extension of existing work on vowel perception and display a novel acceleration effect for the bilingual infants in phonetic perception. In addition, we propose a novel heightened acoustic sensitivity hypothesis, arguing that bilingual infants may pay more attention to acoustic details in the input than their monolingual peers. Significance: The observed progressive phonetic discrimination pattern of the native contrast contributes to our knowledge in infant language development, and specifically perceptual reorganization patterns, in the first year after birth. The observed acceleration effect, along with its explanations, provides new insights into the influence of bilingualism and potential bilingual advantages in infancy.

This paper examines the ability of bilingual infants who were learning Dutch and another non-tone language to discriminate tonal contrasts. All infants from 5 to 18 months of age succeeded in discriminating a tonal contrast of Mandarin Chinese (Tone 1 versus Tone 4) and showed a U-shaped pattern when facing a less acoustically salient manipulated version (contracted) of the aforementioned contrast. Specifically, infants showed initial sensitivity to the contracted contrast during their early months, followed by a loss of sensitivity at the stage where tonal perceptual reorganization typically occurs, and a sensitivity rebound by the end of the first year after birth. Compared to a previous studying of ours testing monolingual Dutch infants (Liu & Kager, 2014), the discrimination patterns of bilingual infants revealed both similarities and differences. On one hand, as with monolinguals, non-tone-learning bilingual infants’ tonal perception presented plasticity influenced by contrast acoustic salience along the trajectory of perceptual reorganization; as well as a general U-shaped perceptual pattern when discriminating non-native tones. On the other hand, bilingual infants appeared to regain sensitivity to the contracted tonal contrast at an earlier age (11–12 months) in comparison with monolinguals infants (17–18 months). We provide several explanations, stemming from the simultaneous exposure to two languages, to account for the 6-month bilingual perceptual plasticity from linguistic and cognitive perspectives. The overall outcomes of the study offer insights into the infant perceptual reorganization and language development trajectory, expand on the differences between monolingual and bilingual language development, and broaden our understanding of the influence of bilingual exposure to the perception of non-native contrasts in infancy from linguistic and cognitive perspectives.

This study investigates children’s interpretation of sentences with two logical operators: Dutch universal modal hoeven and negation (niet). In adult Dutch, hoeven is an NPI that necessarily scopes under negation, giving rise to a not > necessary reading. The findings from a hidden-object task with 5- and 6-year-old children showed that children’s performance is suggestive of an interpretation of sentences with hoeft niet in which the modal scopes over negation (necessary > not). This is in line with the Semantic Subset Principle that dictates that children should opt for the strongest possible reading in case of potential scope ambiguities. The full pattern of results, however, seems to be determined, in addition, by a particular strategy children use when facing uncertainty called Premature Closure.

This study investigates how children acquire prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited spontaneous production of sentences in various focus conditions from children aged four to eleven. We found that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use some pitch-related cues in some tones and duration in all tones in an adult-like way to distinguish focus from non-focus at the age of four to five. Their use of pitch-related cues is not yet fully adult-like in certain tones at the age of eleven. Further, they are adult-like in the use of duration in distinguishing narrow focus from broad focus at four or five but in not using pitch-related cues for this purpose at seven or eight. The later acquisition of pitch-related cues may be related to the use of pitch for lexical purposes, and the differences in the use of pitch in different tones can be explained by differences in how easy it is to vary pitch-related parameters without changing tonal identity.

OCP-Place, a cross-linguistically well-attested constraint against pairs of consonants with shared [place], is psychologically real. Studies have shown that the processing of words violating OCP-Place is inhibited. Functionalists assume that OCP arises as a consequence of low-level perception: a consonant following another with the same [place] cannot be faithfully perceived as an independent unit. If functionalist theories were correct, then lexical access would be inhibited if two homorganic consonants conjoin at word boundaries—a problem that can only be solved with lexical feedback. Here, we experimentally challenge the functional account by showing that OCP-Place can be used as a speech segmentation cue during pre-lexical processing without lexical feedback, and that the use relates to distributions in the input. In Experiment 1, native listeners of Dutch located word boundaries between two labials when segmenting an artificial language. This indicates a use of OCP-Labial as a segmentation cue, implying a full perception of both labials. Experiment 2 shows that segmentation performance cannot solely be explained by well-formedness intuitions. Experiment 3 shows that knowledge of OCP-Place depends on language-specific input: in Dutch, co-occurrences of labials are under-represented, but co-occurrences of coronals are not. Accordingly, Dutch listeners fail to use OCP-Coronal for segmentation.

In the current study, we examined what forms the phonological knowledge of T3 sandhi among native Mandarin listeners and we ask the question whether there are cognitively based perceptual constraints that relate to T3 sandhi. In Mandarin Chinese, T3 sandhi restricts the co-occurrence of low tones (T3), and neutralizes the rising tone (T2) and T3 when followed by another T3. We tested native Mandarin Chinese listeners and Dutch listeners on bisyllabic tone discrimination tasks. We found that the phonological knowledge of native listeners involves the neutralization between T2T3 and underlying T3T3 sequences, rather than perceiving a boundary between consecutive T3s. Dutch listener, without the phonological knowledge of Chinese tones, also perceive T2T3 as most similar to the underlying T3T3 sequence. Such cross-linguistic consistency in perception suggests a common functional basis, where memory limitation may play a role. Listeners may attend more to the offset of an incoming tone, and as T2T3 and T3T3 share the same offset, they tend to be misperceived as identical. Regardless of the cross-linguistic consistency in perception, the misperception between T2T3 and underlying T3T3 is more pronounced among Mandarin listeners, showing that phonological knowledge shapes perception in return.

A fundamental question in language acquisition research is how language-specific input interacts with (pre-linguistic) universal concepts. In order to shed more light on this issue, the present paper reports the results of two experiments, set up as a modified version of Syrett, Kristen & Jeffrey Lidz. 2010. 30-month-olds use the distribution and meaning of adverbs to interpret novel adjectives. Language Learning and Development 6(4). 258–282. Their study has revealed that English-speaking 30-month-olds use degree adverbs for interpreting novel adjectives; the participants were more likely to assign a relative meaning (e.g., tallness) to a novel adjective if the adjective was modified by the booster very and to select an absolute interpretation (e.g., straightness) if the adjective was preceded the maximizer completely. The distribution in Dutch, although typologically similar to English, is obscured by phonological, morphological and semantic factors, which makes the Dutch degree adverbs heel ‘very’ and helemaal ‘completely’ less reliable cues to a language learner. In Russian, the booster očen’ ‘very’ is a reliable cue and the maximizer sovsem ‘completely’ is not, since it can be used with both absolute and negative-pole relative adjectives. The results demonstrate that children’s performance is related to the reliability of cues in their input. Russian-speaking toddlers only relied on the booster očen’, but not on the maximizer sovsem for assigning novel adjectives to semantic classes, and their Dutch-speaking peers did not show evidence of using degree adverbs for adjective learning at all. No evidence of interfering universal predispositions was found.

This article presents a reanalysis of the foot-based phonology of Chugach Alutiiq (henceforth CA), a language that displays a complex mixed ternary–binary rhythm, as well as metrically conditioned distributions of pitch, fortition and vowel lengthening. Elaborating on earlier analyses of CA that had posited some kind of ternary constituent (Hewitt, 1991, 1992; Leer, 1985a, 1985b, 1985c; Rice, 1992), we propose CA should be analyzed by means of the Internally Layered Ternary (ILT) foot, a minimal recursive foot (Prince, 1980; Selkirk, 1980), which was recently revived in a typological study of binary–ternary stress (Martínez-Paricio & Kager, 2015). It will be argued that ILT feet capture CA’s puzzling dual behavior of unstressed and stressed syllables straightforwardly by referring to the status of syllables as heads or dependents of minimal or non-minimal feet. After showing the value of ILT feet in the analysis of CA rhythmic and segmental patterns, we turn to our analytical focus, the distributions of high and low pitch. This distribution is arguably metrically conditioned, yet an analysis based on stress or standard binary feet cannot capture it, whereas the ILT approach can. To highlight the advantages of our approach, we end by offering brief comparisons with previous analyses of CA. Este artículo presenta un reanálisis de diversos aspectos fonológicos de la lengua esquimal Chugach Alutiiq (de ahora en adelante, CA): la asignación de acentos rítmicos (binarios y ternarios), la distribución de los tonos alto y bajo, el fortalecimiento de algunas consonantes y el alargamiento de determinadas vocales. Influidos por análisis previos de la lengua que postularon la existencia de algún tipo de constituyente prosódico ternario en CA (Hewitt, 1991, 1992; Leer 1985a, 1985b, 1985c; Rice, 1992), proponemos que la fonología métrica de CA debe analizarse por medio de un pie Ternario Mínimamente Recursivo (TMR); estas estructuras fueron originariamente propuestas por Prince (1980) y Selkirk (1980), y han sido recientemente retomadas en un estudio tipológico sobre el ritmo binario y ternario (Martínez-Paricio & Kager, 2015). A lo largo del artículo se demostrará que todos estos procesos pueden recibir un análisis fonológico sencillo si se incorporan, entre las posibles representaciones métricas del lenguaje, los pies TMR. Concretamente, se demostrará que el pie TMR permite dar cuenta del comportamiento dual de las sílabas tónicas y átonas en CA mediante la referencia al estatus específico de estas sílabas bien como núcleos o dependientes de un pie mínimo o no mínimo. Tras resaltar el papel que desempeñan los pies recursivos en diversos patrones rítmicos y segmentales de CA, nos centramos en el análisis de la distribución de los tonos alto y bajo en esta lengua. El artículo se cierra con una breve comparación con otros análisis alternativos.

Although even young infants were shown to have some understanding of (adjectival) scalarity, studies of children’s spontaneous speech suggest that the acquisition of scalar semantics may not yet be completed by the time children enter primary school. In the present study, this hypothesis is tested by investigating the comprehension of diminishers (‘a bit’) and consequential degree modifiers (‘too’) modifying relative adjectives (long, warm) in a group of 5-year-old Dutch-speaking children. Based on earlier production studies, it is hypothesized that by age 6 children are adult-like in their comprehension of ‘too’ and not yet target-like in the comprehension of ‘a bit’ modifying relative adjectives. The results of the comprehension experiment demonstrate that some children have already acquired the semantics of both ‘too’ and ‘a bit’, whereas others still have trouble understanding combinations of relative adjectives with each of these degree adverbs. Furthermore, poor comprehenders need more time to process sentences with ‘a bit’ compared to the same sentences with ‘too’, presumably revealing a greater conceptual complexity of diminishers. These findings are consistent with the idea that the acquisition of scalarity has a protracted time course

This paper is a longitudinal investigation of adjective use by children aged 1;8−2;8, speaking Dutch, German, French, Hebrew, and Turkish, and by their caregivers. Each adjective token in transcripts of spontaneous speech was coded for semantic class. The development of adjective use in each semantic class was analysed by means of a multilevel logistic regression. The results show that toddlers and their parents use adjectives more often as the child grows older. However, this holds only for semantic classes denoting concrete concepts, such as physical properties, colour, and size. Adjectives denoting more abstract properties are barely used by children and parents throughout the first year of adjective acquisition. The correlations between adjective frequencies in child speech and child-directed speech are very strong at the beginning, but decrease with time as the child develops independent adjective use. The composition of early adjective lexicons is very similar in the five languages under study.

This article presents a novel OT analysis of ternary rhythm, using the restrictive format of McCarthy (2003)'s categorical alignment constraints, which we will refer to as ‘non-intervention constraints’, using the terminology of Ellison (1994), and argues for the rehabilitation of internally layered feet in metrical representations (i.e. feet with one layer of recursion). By means of a computer-generated factorial typology, we demonstrate that the constraint set proposed here generates the full typology of binary and ternary rhythm. The resulting typology suggests that there is no absolute boundary between binary and ternary systems; rather, a continuum emerges, such that binary and ternary feet may coexist in rhythmic stress systems.

Knowledge of phonotactics is commonly assumed to derive from the lexicon. However, computational studies have suggested that phonotactic constraints might arise before the lexicon is in place, in particular from co-occurrences in continuous speech. The current study presents two artificial language learning experiments aimed at testing whether phonotactic learning can take place in the absence of words. Dutch participants were presented with novel consonant constraints embedded in continuous artificial languages. Vowels occurred at random, which resulted in an absence of recurring word forms in the speech stream. In Experiment 1 participants with different training languages showed significantly different preferences on a set of novel test items. However, only one of the two languages resulted in preferences that were above chance-level performance. In Experiment 2 participants were exposed to a control language without novel statistical cues. Participants did not develop a preference for either phonotactic structure in the test items. An analysis of Dutch phonotactics indicated that the failure to induce novel phonotactics in one condition might have been due to interference from the native language. Our findings suggest that novel phonotactics can be learned from continuous speech, but participants have difficulty learning novel patterns that go against the native language.

Can second language (L2) learners acquire a grammar that allows a subset of the structures allowed by their native grammar? This question is addressed here with respect to acquisition of phonotactics. On the assumption that the L2 initial state equals the native grammar's final state, learnability theory would predict that a lack of negative evidence for phonotactic structures that are illegal in the target language precludes acquisition of the target grammar. This prediction is tested for L1-Russian (superset) and L1-Spanish (subset) L2 learners of Dutch by means of word-likeness judgments and lexical decision experiments. Participants responded to nonwords containing consonant clusters in onsets and codas that are legal (1) only in Russian, (2) only in Russian and Dutch, or (3) in all three languages. The results converge to show that advanced L1-Russian and L1-Spanish L2 learners possess native-like phonotactic knowledge. Analysis shows that this knowledge cannot be attributed to transfer of lexical statistics from the native language. The results suggest that L2 phonotactic acquisition is not affected by subset/superset relations between the native language and target language. Some possible explanations for our findings are discussed.

Probabilistic phonotactic knowledge facilitates perception, but categorical phonotactic illegality can cause misperceptions, especially of non-native phoneme combinations. If misperceptions induced by first language (L1) knowledge filter second language input, access to second language (L2) probabilistic phonotactics is potentially blocked for L2 acquisition. The facilitatory effects of L2 probabilistic phonotactics and categorical filtering effects of L1 phonotactics were compared and contrasted in a series of cross-modal priming experiments. Dutch native listeners and L1 Spanish and Japanese learners of Dutch had to perform a lexical decision task on Dutch words that started with /sC/ clusters that were of different degrees of probabilistic wellformedness in Dutch but illegal in Spanish and Japanese. Versions of target words with Spanish illegality resolving epenthesis in the clusters primed the Spanish group, showing an L1 filter; a similar effect was not found for the Japanese group. In addition, words with wellformed /sC/ clusters were recognised faster, showing a positive effect on processing of probabilistic wellformedness. However, Spanish learners with higher proficiency were facilitated to a greater extent by wellformed but epenthesised clusters, showing that although probabilistic learning occurs in spite of the L1 filter, the acquired probabilistic knowledge is still affected by L1 categorical knowledge. Categorical phonotactic and probabilistic knowledge are of a different nature and interact in acquisition.

In a number of languages, prosody is used to highlight new information (or focus). In Dutch, focus is marked by accentuation, whereby focal constituents are accented and post-focal constituents are de-accented. Even if pausing is not traditionally seen as a cue to focus in Dutch, several previous studies have pointed to a possible relationship between pausing and information structure. Considering that Dutch-speaking 4 to 5 year olds are not yet completely proficient in using accentuation for focus and that children generally pause more than adults, we asked whether pausing might be an available parameter for children to manipulate for focus. Sentences with varying focus structure were elicited from 10 Dutch-speaking 4 to 5 year olds and 9 Dutch-speaking adults by means of a picture-matching game. Comparing pause durations before focal and non-focal targets showed pre-target pauses to be significantly longer when the targets were focal than when they were not. Notably, the use of pausing was more robust in the children than in the adults, suggesting that children exploit pausing to mark focus more generally than adults do, at a stage where their mastery of the canonical cues to focus is still developing.

This paper will draw up a survey of metrical window systems informed by typological databases. The survey confirms that the maximum window size equals three syllables at both edges. Only final syllables (not initial ones) can be obligatorily unstressed. Any syllable in initial and final windows can be a default position. Three metrical models will be tested with respect to these generalizations: the first using binary feet and symmetrical extrametricality; the second, a grid-only model with anti-lapse constraints; the third, weakly layered ternary feet. Only the latter two models are able to generate the full attested typology. Yet only the weakly layered model avoids overgenerations known as ‘midpoint pathology’. The consequences for metrical theory will be discussed.

The semantics of superordinate collectives (superordinates hereafter) such as English furniture are argued to be count or mass, or to allow both count and mass readings. When tested experimentally, however, it has repeatedly been reported that superordinates denote individuals in a wide range of typologically distinct languages, including Mandarin. A close examination of the experimental method and design commonly used in previous research suggests, however, that the attested individual-denoting reading might only be the preferred reading in neutral contexts rather than the only reading that superordinates allow. In the present study, using a Truth Value Judgment Task we investigate the interpretation of Mandarin superordinates by Mandarin-speaking adults and 4–6-year-old children. We found that bare superordinates can convey both individual-denoting and non-individual-denoting readings depending on specific contexts provided, but such contextual manipulation cannot override morphosyntax (the presence of an individual classifier that selects an individual-denoting reading only). Taken together, our experimental data indicate that both contextual and morphosyntactic information play an important role in the interpretation of Mandarin superordinates, but that they function in different ways. In a word, the present study contributes new data and opens new perspectives for further investigation in the interpretation of superordinates in Mandarin as well as in other languages.

Probabilistic phonotactic knowledge facilitates perception, but categorical phonotactic illegality can cause misperceptions, especially of non-native phoneme combinations. If misperceptions induced by first language (L1) knowledge filter second language input, access to second language (L2) probabilistic phonotactics is potentially blocked for L2 acquisition. The facilitatory effects of L2 probabilistic phonotactics and categorical filtering effects of L1 phonotactics were compared and contrasted in a series of cross-modal priming experiments. Dutch native listeners and L1 Spanish and Japanese learners of Dutch had to perform a lexical decision task on Dutch words that started with /sC/ clusters that were of different degrees of probabilistic wellformedness in Dutch but illegal in Spanish and Japanese. Versions of target words with Spanish illegality resolving epenthesis in the clusters primed the Spanish group, showing an L1 filter; a similar effect was not found for the Japanese group. In addition, words with wellformed /sC/ clusters were recognised faster, showing a positive effect on processing of probabilistic wellformedness. However, Spanish learners with higher proficiency were facilitated to a greater extent by wellformed but epenthesised clusters, showing that although probabilistic learning occurs in spite of the L1 filter, the acquired probabilistic knowledge is still affected by L1 categorical knowledge. Categorical phonotactic and probabilistic knowledge are of a different nature and interact in acquisition.

In a number of languages, prosody is used to highlight new information (or focus). In Dutch, focus is marked by accentuation, whereby focal constituents are accented and post-focal constituents are de-accented. Even if pausing is not traditionally seen as a cue to focus in Dutch, several previous studies have pointed to a possible relationship between pausing and information structure. Considering that Dutch-speaking 4 to 5 year olds are not yet completely proficient in using accentuation for focus and that children generally pause more than adults, we asked whether pausing might be an available parameter for children to manipulate for focus. Sentences with varying focus structure were elicited from 10 Dutch-speaking 4 to 5 year olds and 9 Dutch-speaking adults by means of a picture-matching game. Comparing pause durations before focal and non-focal targets showed pre-target pauses to be significantly longer when the targets were focal than when they were not. Notably, the use of pausing was more robust in the children than in the adults, suggesting that children exploit pausing to mark focus more generally than adults do, at a stage where their mastery of the canonical cues to focus is still developing.