This paper reflects on a project-based curriculum employing constructed languages to teach linguistics, with a focus on phonology. In a special topics linguistics course, nine students were led through the construction of a language. While students in introductory linguistics courses sometimes struggle with phonology, active engagement with a semester-long language construction project endowed these students with the practical motivation to understand (1) what phonology is, (2) how phonological rules work, and (3) why rules surface in the first place. They readily captured generalizations based on natural classes of sounds, recognizing the systematicity of their constructed phonology. Student performance and engagement in this course support the use of constructed languages as a pedagogical tool in linguistics. Because an ongoing project builds in problem-solving opportunities and processual thinking, highlighting relationships among key concepts, students achieve a more comprehensive understanding of core areas in the broader linguistic picture.

Cet article questionne la nature des troubles phonologiques à travers le prisme de la notion de complexité phonologique chez des locuteurs francophones atteints d’aphasie. Si de nombreux travaux ont été consacrés aux erreurs phonétiques portant sur la réalisation des phonèmes, plus rares sont les études qui prennent en compte la dimension phonologique, i.e. l’environnement contextuel. Toutefois certains auteurs montrent que la structure syllabique du mot, ou encore la position des segments au sein des syllabes influencent les réalisations des locuteurs atteints d’une aphasie (Wilshire & Nespoulous, 2003; Buchwald et Miozzo, 2012; Buchwald, 2017). Ces facteurs renvoient à la notion de complexité phonologique.

Cette étude présente une analyse des erreurs phonologiques dans l’aphasie à partir d’un corpus de données empiriques récoltées auprès de huit locuteurs. Plusieurs facteurs de la complexité phonologique sont ici analysés afin de comprendre s’ils jouent un rôle dans la réalisation des erreurs. L’hypothèse est que la présence de séquences consonantiques, la position de ces séquences dans les items (initiale vs médiane), la nature de ces séquences (hétérosyllabique, tautosyllabique) ainsi que la longueur des items (bi vs trisyllabique) influencent la production des erreurs. À travers cette recherche, nous espérons accroître les connaissances sur la nature des déficits phonologiques.

Substance-free phonology or SFP (Reiss 2017) has renewed interest in the question of abstraction in phonology. Perhaps the most common form of abstraction through the absence of substance is underspecification, where some aspects of speech lack representation in memorized representations, within the phonology or in the phonetic implementation (Archangeli 1988, Keating 1988, Lahiri and Reetz 2010 among many others). The fundamental basis for phonology is argued to be a mental model of speech events in time, following Raimy (2000) and Papillon (2020). Each event can have properties (one-place predicates that are true of the event), which include the usual phonological features, and also structural entities for extended events like moras and syllables. Features can be bound together in an event, yielding segment-like properties. Pairs of events can be ordered in time by the temporal logic precedence relation represented by ‘<’. Events, features and precedence form a directed multigraph structure with edges in the graph interpreted as “maybe next”. Some infant bimodal speech perception results are examined using this framework, arguing for underspecification in time in the developing phonological representations.

Theories of phonology claim variously that phonological elements are either innate or emergent, and either substance-full or substance-free. A hitherto underdeveloped source of evidence for choosing between the four possible combinations of these claims lies in showing precisely how a child can acquire phonological elements. This article presents computer simulations that showcase a learning algorithm with which the learner creates phonological elements from a large number of sound–meaning pairs. In the course of language acquisition, phonological features gradually emerge both bottom-up and top-down, that is, both from the phonetic input (i.e., sound) and from the semantic or morphological input (i.e., structured meaning). In our computer simulations, the child's phonological features end up with emerged links to sounds (phonetic substance) as well as with emerged links to meanings (semantic substance), without containing either phonetic or semantic substance. These simulations therefore show that emergent substance-free phonological features are learnable. In the absence of learning algorithms for linking innate features to the language-specific variable phonetic reality, as well as the absence of learning algorithms for substance-full emergence, these results provide a new type of support for theories of phonology in which features are emergent and substance-free.

We argue that the representational primes of the human phonological faculty, the so-called distinctive features, are innate and substance-free. Our arguments for the innateness of features are built on traditional and novel logical arguments, experimental evidence accumulating over recent decades, and somewhat detailed proposals about their neurobiological reality. As symbols in the brain, features are substance-free, that is, they are devoid of articulatory and acoustic content, or even any direct reference to such phenomena. This is consistent with our substance-free conception of phonological computation, an approach that eschews functionalist notions like markedness, ease of articulation, and so on. We also outline a neural model of the phonetics-phonology interface called Cognitive Phonetics, which transduces innate features to speech articulation and from speech acoustics. These extra-grammatical transduction procedures are also part of the human biological endowment, which leaves no room for language-specific phonetics in our theory of the externalization of language. We show how Cognitive Phonetics can account for traditionally recognized intersegmental coarticulation, as well as the previously unexplored intrasegmental coarticulation, strongly suggesting that the basic units of speech production are transduced features.

This article argues that phonological features have no substantive properties, instead, segments are assigned features by learning strategies set to the task of devising a computational system for a phonology that is consistent with the requirements of UG. I address two problems for such a substance-free model. The first is the Card-Grammar problem, which has been suggested to argue for universal substantive features, on the premise that, otherwise, language data cannot be stored in a fashion necessary to correct learning errors. The Card Grammar problem disappears, in a suitably modular theory of mind with learned interfaces, where the mind still can retain information not parsed in a particular grammar. The second problem is the need for a demonstration, not just an assertion, that a reasonable theory of grammar and learning which has no access to phonetic substance can yield a coherent system of feature assignments. This is accomplished by modeling the learning of features necessary for the phonology of Kerewe.

The aim of this study is to determine whether it is the phonetic or phonological effect on processing that is stronger when the two effects are in conflict. Results are presented from a recall experiment, in which speakers of French and Tłı̨chǫ (Dene, Canada) recall syllables with either H or L tone. While French speakers remembered H syllables more accurately, Tłı̨chǫ speakers remembered L tones more accurately. The findings show simultaneous effects of phonetics and phonology, and have implications for notions of salience and how it can be measured as well as for the different types of salience that are active in speech sound processing.

Vowel-consonant metathesis is observed in a variety of contexts throughout the Nivaĉle (Mataguayan) grammar. It occurs in both verbal and nominal domains, characteristically resulting from the affixation of a consonant-initial suffix to a consonant-final stem. This paper provides an optimality theoretic account for vowel-consonant metathesis and vowel epenthesis in Nivaĉle. It is demonstrated that metathesis responds to phonological requirements; specifically, it serves to avoid marked structures in the language: complex codas, derived complex onsets, and bad syllable contacts. The prosodic analysis of syllable structure constraints aims to provide broad empirical coverage, as well as a coherent and integrated theoretical interpretation.

It is commonly noted that standard French is losing the contrast between its two low vowels /a/ and /ɑ/, due to the fronting of the back vowel. The difference in length, which accompanied the qualitative difference of this pair, is affected as well. In mainland France, this tendency can be found to various degrees across the country, and is spreading throughout the speech community. This article further develops the picture of the current status of the low vowel contrast by investigating Belgian and Swiss French, where length is known to play overall a far more prominent role in the vowel inventories than it does in standard French. Are Belgian and Swiss French also affected by the merger of the two low vowels? To what extent can a difference in length and/or timbre still be found? And how do the patterns of contrast neutralisation/preservation relate to the developments in France?

In this article, we address relations between lexical and phonological development, with an emphasis on the notion of phonological contrast. We begin with an overview of the literature on word learning and on infant speech perception. Among other results, we report on studies showing that toddlers’ perceptual abilities do not correlate with the development of phonological contrasts within their lexicons. We then engage in a systematic comparison between the lexical development of two child learners of English and their acquisition of consonants in syllable onsets. We establish a developmental timeline for each child's onset consonant system, which we compare to the types of phonological contrasts that are present in their expressive vocabularies at each relevant milestone. Like the earlier studies, ours also fails to return tangible parallels between the two areas of development. The data instead suggest that patterns of phonological development are best described in terms of the segmental categories they involve, in relative independence from measures of contrastiveness within the learners’ lexicons.

Le coratin est un dialecte parlé dans la région des Pouilles où l'on observe un processus de réduction vocalique : toutes les voyelles atones se réduisent à schwa sauf /a/. Cependant, cette réduction n'a pas lieu lorsqu'elles sont adjacentes à une consonne qui partage de la mélodie comme la palatalité pour les voyelles antérieures et la vélarité ou la labialité pour les voyelles postérieures. On observe également que l'ATRité des voyelles moyennes alterne : /ε,ɔ/ tonique se réalisent [e,o] en position atone et /o,ɔ/ font surface en position atone par un [u] uniquement lorsque la consonne adjacente est vélaire. L'analyse de cette alternance sera basée sur une version de la Théorie des Eléments ainsi que sur des contraintes de licenciement qui définissent d'une part le choix particulier qu'une langue fait des possibilités combinatoires, et d'autre part participe à définir les propriétés des processus phonologiques de la langue.

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the reduction of unstressed vowels in Coratino, a language spoken in the Apulia region of Italy. Its vowel inventory includes seven vowels: /i, e, ε, a, ɔ, o, u/. All but /a/ are reduced to a schwa when they surface in unstressed positions. Furthermore, back and front vowels are not reduced in unstressed positions when they are adjacent to a labial consonant, or adjacent to a velar followed by a palatal. These vowels also remain non-reduced in word-initial position. Therefore, there are three contexts in which these vowels are not reduced (in stressed positions, adjacent to a consonant, and in word-initial positions). This article aims to reduce this disjunction.

Theoretical accounts of Greek compounds argue for a close relation between their stress properties and their underlying structure. Compounds that preserve and receive stress at the same position as their second constituent are analyzed as stem-word constructions, while those that receive antepenultimate stress are viewed as belonging to the stem-stem category. Using an auditory lexical decision task, we examine the effect of stress change on the processing of compounds in the light of existing theoretical linguistic accounts. Although our experimental results do not reach statistical significance, we believe that they are informative of the cognitive status and role of stress in compound processing. Finally, they relate to existing theories of compounding in Greek and reflect the complex interaction of the psycholinguistic effects of stress and the structural properties of these constructions.

Derived clusters in Northern East (NE) Cree are traditionally assumed to result from the deletion of an intervening vowel. I propose, rather, that they arise from vowel devocalization, a process involving gradient vowel shortening or weakening. First, I demonstrate the compelling similarity between the process leading to derived clusters in NE Cree and vowel devocalization in non-Algonquian languages. Second, I show that consonants in NE Cree derived clusters display phonetic lengthening, one of the phonetic correlates accompanying vowel devocalization. I suggest that the gestures of these lengthened consonants overlap the vowel to the point that it is not perceived