There is by now a well-established consensus that vowel harmony in Tungusic is based on a feature referencing tongue root (TR) position (Li 1996, Zhang 1996). The backdrop for this consensus is the increasingly accepted view that TR harmony is characteristic of the language families commonly grouped together as Altaic: Ko (to appear) for Mongolic; Kim (1993) and Ko (2010) for Korean; and Vaux (...

The brain is constantly generating predictions of future sensory input to enable efficient adaptation. In the auditory domain, this applies also to the processing of speech. Here we aimed to determine whether the brain predicts the following segments of speech input on the basis of language-specific phonological rules that concern non-adjacent phonemes. Auditory event-related potentials (ERP) w...

One of the major goals of generative linguistics is to produce a theory of language that can generate all possible languages without predicting languages that are unnatural in that they lie outside the scope of the human capacity to learn. In order to achieve this goal, the nature of language must be understood with regard to the distinction between linguistic patterns that are outside the rang...

The problem of child language acquisition has been a driving concern of modern theoretical linguistics since at least the 1950s. But traditional linguistic research has focused on constructing models like the Optimality Theory model of phonology (Prince and Smolensky, 2004). Learning models for those theories like the OT learning theory in Riggle (2004) are sought later to explain how a child c...

the third person singular enclitic verb /-ast/ which is equivalent to english verb “is” undergoes the highest number of  phonological processes among persian enclitic forms of the verb “boudan” (to be); it changes to [as] in one environment, to [s] in another, and to [e] in four environments. deletion of /t/ is common in all six contexts. these different pronunciations are determined by various...