This paper presents a case of patterned exceptionality. The case is Tagalog nasal substitution, a phenomenon in which a prefix-final nasal fuses with a steminitial obstruent. The rule is variable on a word-by-word basis, but its distribution is phonologically patterned, as shown through dictionary and corpus data. Speakers appear to have implicit knowledge of the patterning, as shown through ex...

This paper examines so-called a-prefixing in the speech of dialect speakers living in Appalachia. Building on existing empirical work, and leveraging results from a GoldVarb analysis, I posit the a-prefix realizes a morpho-pragmatic feature which expresses a range of related meanings, including surprise, unexpectedness, and newsworthiness. This range of meanings is encompassed in the linguistic...

Three experiments addressed the hypothesis that production factors constrain phonotactic learning in adult English speakers, and that this constraint gives rise to a markedness effect on learning. In Experiment 1, an acoustic measure was used to assess consonant–consonant coarticulation in naturally produced nonwords, which were then used as stimuli in a phonotactic learning experiment. Results...

This paper examines vowel harmony initiated by a weak trigger. Height harmony in Veneto Italian dialects, wherein a post-tonic high vowel triggers raising of preceding mid vowels, forms a case study. Veneto presents two variable patterns: stresstargeted harmony, in which harmony propagates to the stressed syllable, and maximal extension harmony, in which raising persists to pretonic vowels. The...

In this paper, I argue that only one of the proposed mechanisms is adequate on both of these counts: lexically specific constraints. Furthermore, I argue that these criteria necessitate the lexical indexation of both markedness and faithfulness constraints. The first of these claims contradicts the position of Anttila (2002), who argues that cophonologies can better meet criterion (1b) than lex...

Sensitivity to grammatical gender was investigated in 22 Russian-speaking aphasic patients, compared with young controls. Experiment 1 used a cued shadowing paradigm to assess gender priming (facilitation and/or inhibition of lexical access by a prenominal modifier with congruent, incongruent or neutral gender). Experiment 2 used a grammaticality judgment paradigm with similar stimuli. Normals ...

Verb inflection errors, often seen in agrammatic aphasic speech, have been attributed to either impaired encoding of diacritical features that specify tense and aspect, or to impaired affixation during phonological encoding. In this study we examined the effect of semantic markedness, word form frequency and affix frequency, as well as accuracy and error patterns, in an attempt to evaluate whet...