The postposed definite determiner (DET) in French-lexified Antillean Creoles such as Haitian and St. Lucian displays an unexpected pattern of allomorphy. Its C-initial form la appears after consonantand glide-final stems (pitit la 'the child') whereas a vocoid-initial form appears after stems ending in vowels. Glides are inserted after non-low vowels (rua 'the wheel'), but a is used after low v...

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 establishes the claim that geminate sonorants are cross-linguistically marked, and furthermore, that the relative sonority of a geminate positively correlates with its markedness, i.e., the universal ranking *GEMGLIDE » *GEMLIQUID » *GEMNASAL holds. This ranking is supported by a cross-linguistic survey of geminate inventories (Podesva 2002; Taylor 1985) as well as by a number of pho...

This paper is concerned with the related topics of assimilatory dominance and markedness relations in tongue root harmony systems. While a range of views has existed on these topics, much work in recent years adopts the view that either [+ATR] or [-ATR] can function as the dominant value in a language, and that markedness relations are determined in conjunction with tongue body height. That is,...

In their article ‘What we know about what we have never heard: Evidence from perceptual illusions’, Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, and Vaknin (2007) address the question of whether listeners have innate knowledge of phonological markedness. Focusing on sonority and syllable structure, they answer this question positively. SpeciWcally, they argue that English listeners’ perception of onset clusters...

An interesting puzzle of Hungarian phonology is gemination in recent loanwords borrowed from English, German (and occasionally, from French). A consonant following a short stressed vowel is often geminated in the loanword, even if the consonant doubling does not have an orthographic reflex in the source word, i.e. the consonant in question is not spelt as a double letter in the source word. Unl...

This article investigates the role of syntactic and prosodic markedness constraints on the construction of phonological phrases (/or p-phrases) in Catalan. It is shown that the construction of prosodic structure in this language cannot solely rely on syntactic information but rather also has to refer to prosodic markedness constraints which regulate the size and eurhythmicity of phrase constitu...

In this paper we investigate how case features are represented and processed during language comprehension. To this end, we explored the phenomena of case attraction in German in a series of four experiments using a speeded grammaticality judgment procedure. Case attraction leads to errors that are akin to subject-verb agreement errors intensively studied in English and other languages (e.g. Bo...