The proposed project involves the design and implementation of a novel computational model of simultaneous acquisition of two languages from birth, or bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). More specifically, we explore computationally the theory of Phonological Bootstrapping (Christophe et al. 1994, Christophe and Dupoux 1996, Morgan and Demuth 1996, Christophe et al. 1997), working with...

The field of generative metrics attempts to characterize the tacit knowledge of fluent participants in a metrical tradition. An adequate metrical analysis will characterize the set of phonological structures constituting well-formed verse in a particular tradition and meter. Structures that meet this criterion are termed metrical. An adequate analysis will also specify differences of complexity...

Phonological processes and structures are often limited to a particular set of a language’s words, such as loanwords, Latinate words in English, or Yamato words in Japanese. Typically, the etymologically older, or “core” set of words is more restricted in the structures that it permits, and is (hence) subject to more processes. To capture such restrictions in Optimality Theory, Itô and Mester (...

This talk is devoted to a rather ‘conceptual’ discussion of some notions that bear directly on the relationship between phonology and morphosyntax. First I will discuss some of the original formulations of the principle of Dual Articulation (Dual Patterning) as found in the work of Martinet, Meillet and Hockett, and then we’ll see how dual articulation is now often understood. Initially, there ...

The task of our research is to form phone-like models and a phoneme-like set from spoken word samples without using any transcriptions except for the lexical identi cation of each word in a vocabulary. This framework is derived from two motivations: 1) automatic design of optimal speech recognition units and structures of phone models, and 2) multi-lingual speech recognition based on languagein...

An effective approach to the study of prosody in spoken language seeks to identify prosodic patterns and their communicative values, and to subsequently find a correlation between these prosodic patterns and other layers of linguistic structure. The present research strives to define a single prosodic boundary pattern: the boundary tone of hesitation disfluencies in spontaneous Israeli Hebrew. ...

Mental representations have continuous as well as discrete, combinatorial properties. For example, while predominantly discrete, phonological representations also vary continuously; this is reflected by gradient effects in instrumental studies of speech production. Can an integrated theoretical framework address both aspects of structure? The framework we introduce here, Gradient Symbol Process...

A mainstay of the debates concerning the phonology-syntax interface are phenomena of external sandhi, that is, phonological alternations whose conditioning environment is across a word boundary. 1A recurrent problem in this area is the fact that it is usually impossible to motivate a purely syntactic account of such alternations. This has led to the widespread consensus that the relation betwee...

In this paper we have investigated the syllabic structures found in Aromanian a Romance language spoken in the Balkans across multiple countries with important communities which spread from Greece to Romania. We have created a dictionary of syllabified words and analyzed a few general quantitative and phonological aspects of the dictionary. Furthermore, we have approached the syllabic complexit...