This article argues from data motivating the existence of the consonantal root in Nonconcatenative Templatic Morphologies (NTM) and the derivational verbal system of Iraqi Arabic for an approach to such root-and-pattern behavior called the “Rootand-Prosody” model. Based upon work in Kramer (2007), this model claims that root-and-pattern behavior arises from the necessary satisfaction of prosodi...

Two experiments use the sentence-picture verification paradigm to study encoding and comparison processes with spatial information. Subjects decided whether a spatial description of a figure or a geometric figure matched a second figure. Three critical results (the effects of display complexity, the effects of lexical markedness, and the relative speeds of “same” and “different” responses) cova...

The role of the mother tongue has been a major topic of second language acquisition research over the last few decades, but despite the overwhelming empirical evidence of cross-linguistic influence in learner language a number Of questions still remain to be answered: what and how much is transferred when, how and why? This study explores the extent to which a theory of linguistic naturalness —...

Background. The notion ‘basic color term’ (BCT) was first defined by Berlin & Kay (1969, B&K). Based on a sample of 98 spoken languages, B&K argued that languages show considerable variation in their BCT systems, but that the attested variation is constrained by a hierarchy according to which BCTs appear in a language in a predictable order. B&K identify seven stages of complexity in this hiera...

This paper examines German Final Devoicing in OT and shows that a full account of the data requires not only an explanation for Final Devoicing itself, but also a model of the stratification of the lexicon. The point of departure of this study is the observation that although various recently proposed analyses of German Final Devoicing in OT seem to make equally good predictions for the voicing...

This paper discusses the partitive-genitive case alternation of Finnish adpositions. This case alternation is explained in terms of bidirectional alignment of markedness in form and meaning. Marked PP meanings are assigned partitive case, unmarked ones genitive case.

Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative account based on polarity correspondence (a.k.a. markedness) has challenged this view. Here we compared metaphor- and polarity-correspondence-based explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. In one experiment, English speakers classified high- and lo...

It has long been known that native speakers judge nonlexical forms as more acceptable the more lexically typical they are (i.e., similar to real words). It has also been shown that speakers judge less marked (i.e., universally more natural) structures as more acceptable than more marked structures. In this study, we investigate for the first time how markedness and lexical typicality interact, ...