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The current study determines the influence of cross-language similarity on native English speakers’ perception and production of Marshallese consonant contrasts. Marshallese provides a unique opportunity to study this influence because all Marshallese consonants have a secondary articulation. Results of discrimination and production tasks indicate that learners more easily acquire sounds if they are perceptually less similar to native language phonemes. In addition, the degree of cross-language similarity seemed to affect perception and production and may also interact with the effect of orthography.

This paper argues for an analysis of Marshallese wh- questions comparable to other Austronesian languages and claims that Marshallese questions with an initial wh- word do not involve wh- movement in the traditional sense. Rather, I argue that this type of question is a pseudocleft and consists of a headless relative clause subject and a wh- predicate that is base generated in the normal predicate position. The wh- predicate then moves to an initial functional projection within the left periphery. In support of this analysis, I discuss (i) the existence of non-identity effects, (ii) the absence of island effects, (iii) the existence of resumptive pronouns, (iv) the appearance of the relative clause complementizer, and (v) the word order of possessive phrases in wh- questions. Further, relevant diagnostics—which include the existence of headless relative clauses in argument positions, the possibility of dummy heads in the relative clause, and the absence of pied piping of non-locative prepositional phrases—also support the conclusion that these questions are pseudoclefts rather than clefts.