Languages are known to exhibit universal restrictions on sound structure. The source of such restrictions, however, is contentious: Do they reflect abstract phonological knowledge, or properties of linguistic experience and auditory perception? We address this question by investigating the restrictions on onset structure. Across languages, onsets of small sonority distances are dispreferred (e....

Do speakers know universal restrictions on linguistic elements that are absent from their language? We report an experimental test of this question. Our case study concerns the universal restrictions on initial consonant sequences, onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, certain onset clusters (e.g., lb) are dispreferred (e.g., systematically under-represented) relative to others ...

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd>lb). We demonstrate that such preferences modulate the perception of unattested ons...

Abstract This exploratory study examined L2 Spanish learners’ tone choices and oral fluency when producing preferred dispreferred speech acts, specifically acceptances refusals. Participants were 27 college students enrolled in intermediate-level classes. They completed a video-based speaking task that elicited four refusals response to imaginary scenarios (two status-equal two status-unequal f...

Following the descriptive and methodological framework of Conversation Analysis, this paper analyzes linguistic strategies employed in order to avoid or prevent dispreferred reactions interaction, examines their implications terms positive negative face. It focuses especially on treatment possible rejections requests offers, avoidance direct disagreement talk-in-interaction. This is a corpus st...

The study of cross-cultural differences in the degree of reliance on different types of inferences shows that pragmatic inference contributing to the additional implicated proposition is the only kind of inference that can be preferred or dispreferred for cultural reasons. Defaults and pragmatic inferences contributing to the truth-conditional representation, on the other hand, are not a matter...

The agent gives an assessment by making statements about gambles f : Accepting (⊕) implies a commitment: (i) outcome ω ∈Ω is determined, (ii) he receives the payoff f (ω). Rejecting (⊖) implies that he considers accepting f unreasonable; this is relevant when combining assessments. An assessment is a pair A ∶= ⟨A⪰;A≺⟩ in A ∶= 2 × 2 of sets of acceptable respectively dispreferred gambles. Unreso...

We present a system for cross-lingual parse disambiguation, exploiting the assumption that the meaning of a sentence remains unchanged during translation and the fact that different languages have different ambiguities. We simultaneously reduce ambiguity in multiple languages in a fully automatic way. Evaluation shows that the system reliably discards dispreferred parses from the raw parser out...

Can children's handedness influence how they represent abstract concepts like kindness and intelligence? Here we show that from an early age, right-handers associate rightward space more strongly with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but the opposite is true for left-handers. In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy sh...

An eye-tracking methodology was used to explore adults' and children's use of two utterance-based cues to overcome referential uncertainty in real time. Participants were first introduced to two characters with distinct color preferences. These characters then produced fluent ("Look! Look at the blicket.") or disfluent ("Look! Look at thee, uh, blicket.") instructions referring to novel objects...