El español de la isla de La Graciosa desde una perspectiva prosódica

Manuel Alvar published the only linguistic work known on Spanish from the island of La Graciosa (Canary Islands) in 1965, focused on the town of Caleta del Sebo, to document, in the field of Linguistic geography, the ALEICan (Linguistic and ethnographic atlas of the Canary Islands [1975–1978]). Alvar’s studies used to cover the lexical, grammatical (morphology and syntax) and phonetic levels of the segmental type, but he did not consider prosodic aspects of speech which would later be incorporated into a new generation of atlases, which would go from paper format to multimedia. As the main exponent, the AMPER project (Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman) was created in 2001 and, within its framework, we intend to describe the melodic characteristics of a group of sentences emitted by a man and a woman from Caleta del Sebo, completing thus the study started by Alvar fifty-five years ago. In this way, the results will show for the first time if there is a prosodic proximity between the eighth island and the seven main islands, which have been widely described in previous works both in formal and in informal speech.

Naturalistic Use of Aspect Morphology in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Grammatical morphology often links small acoustic forms to abstract semantic domains. Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children have reduced access to the acoustic signal and frequently have delayed acquisition of grammatical morphology (e.g., Tomblin, Harrison, Ambrose, Walker, Oleson & Moeller, 2015). This study investigated the naturalistic use of aspectual morphology in DHH children to determine if they organize this semantic domain as normal hearing (NH) children have been found to do. Thirty DHH children (M = 6;8) and 29 NH children (M = 5;11) acquiring English participated in a free-play session and their tokens of perfective (simple past) and imperfective (-ing) morphology were coded for the lexical aspect of the predicate they marked. Both groups showed established prototype effects, favoring perfective + telic and imperfective + atelic pairings over perfective + atelic and perfective + atelic ones. Thus, despite reduced access to the acoustic signal, this DHH group was unimpaired for aspectual organization.

Sentence Imitation With Masked Morphemes in Czech: Memory, Morpheme Frequency, and Morphological Richness

Purpose This study examined two markers of language impairment (LI) in a single experiment, testing sentence imitation and grammatical morphology production using an imitation task with masked morphemes. One goal was to test predictions of the morphological richness account of LI in Czech. We also tested the independent contributions of language and memory skills to sentence imitation performance. Method Seventeen children with LI (5;1–7;6 [years;months]) and 17 vocabulary-matched typically developing (TD) children (3;8–4;11) were administered a sentence imitation task where each sentence had one noun or verb ending replaced by a coughing sound. In addition, a receptive vocabulary and the digit span (backward and forward) tasks were administered. Results Children with LI were significantly less accurate than TD children in sentence imitation task. Both vocabulary and digit span had unique effects on sentence imitation scores. Children with LI were less successful in imitating the target words, especially verbs. However, if they succeeded, their completions of the masked morphemes were no less accurate than in TD children. The accuracy of completions was affected by the morpheme frequency and homophony, but these effects were similar in TD and affected children. Conclusions Sentence imitation is a measure of language skills and verbal memory. Results on morpheme completions are consistent with processing models of LI, but some predictions of the morphological richness model were not confirmed. The results suggest that children with LI might have a deficit in organizing morphosyntactic relations in sentences, rather than in morphological processing proper.

Evidentiality, Modality, and Speech Acts

Evidential constructions have two main semantic effects: They contribute information about an individual's source of evidence, and they potentially modify the force of a sentence. In this article, I review the at-issue status of the evidential information, the indexical and anaphoric properties of evidentials, their force-modifying effect, and the connection throughout to epistemic modality. In some languages, evidentials occur as part of the grammatical morphology, but evidential information can be expressed through a variety of constructions across languages. As such, the study of evidentiality highlights the important role of cross-linguistic semantics and the collaboration between language typology and linguistic semantics. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Beyond Plain and Extra-Grammatical Morphology: Echo-Pairs in Hungarian

This paper presents an investigation of echo-pairs in Hungarian. Echo-pairs are formed by duplicating a base with an altered initial consonant and have diminutive, playful, or intimate connotations (e.g., cica [t͡sit͡sɒ] “cat” → cica-mica [t͡sit͡sɒ-mit͡sɒ] “cat.dim”). Echo-pairs are commonly seen as an example of extra-grammatical morphology in the literature. Our goal in looking at this phenomenon is to gain a better understanding of the morphological mechanisms underlying extra-grammatical phenomena and shed new light on the distinction between plain and extra-grammatical morphology. We analyze data from (a) a collection of echo-pairs extracted from a large corpus of online texts and (b) a large-scale online nonce-word experiment with close to 1,500 participants. Our results reveal two key phonological patterns in the data and some additional systematic variation across words and experimental stimuli. We compare two different models of morphology, the Minimal Generalization Learner and the Generalized Context Model, in terms of their ability to capture this variation. We find that echo-pair formation is best captured by lexicon-oriented models such as the Generalized Context Model, but only when they rely on a structured similarity metric that encodes broader generalizations about the data. Our results do not support a clear-cut distinction between extra-grammatical and plain morphological processes, and we suggest that some of the peculiar characteristics of extra-grammatical phenomena such as echo-pair formation may simply follow from their special function and the limited set of contexts in which they appear.

Beyond plain and extra-grammatical morphology: echo-pairs in Hungarian

This paper presents an investigation of echo-pairs in Hungarian. Echo- pairs are formed by duplicating a base with an altered initial consonant and have diminutive, playful or intimate connotations (e.g. cica `cat' > cica-mica `cat.DIM'). Echo-pairs are commonly seen as an example of extra-grammatical morphology in the literature. Our goal in looking at this phenomenon is to gain a better understanding of the morphological mechanisms underlying extra-grammatical phenomena and shed new light on the distinction between plain and extra-grammatical morphology. We analyse data from (i) a collection of echo-pairs extracted from a large corpus of online texts and (ii) a large-scale online nonce-word experiment with close to 1,500 participants. Our results reveal two key phonological patterns in the data and some additional systematic variation across words and experimental stimuli. We compare two different models of morphology, the Minimal Generalisation Learner and the Generalised Context Model in terms of their ability to capture this variation. We find that echo-pair formation is best captured by lexicon-oriented models like the Generalised Context Model, but only when they rely on a structured similarity metric that encodes broader generalisations about the data. Our results do not support a clear-cut distinction between extra-grammatical and plain morphological processes, and we suggest that some of the peculiar characteristics of extra-grammatical phenomena such as echo-pair formation may simply follow from their special function and the limited set of contexts they appear in.

Variability and consistency in late bilinguals’ morphology

Speaking a late-learned second language (L2) is supposed to yield more variable and less consistent output than speaking one’s first language (L1), particularly with respect to reliably adhering to grammatical morphology. The current study investigates both internal processes involved in encoding morphologically complex words – by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during participants’ silent productions – and the corresponding overt output. We specifically examined compounds with plural or singular modifiers in English. Thirty-one advanced L2 speakers of English (L1: German) were compared to a control group of 20 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found an enhanced (right-frontal) negativity during (silent) morphological encoding for compounds produced from regular plural forms relative to compounds formed from irregular plurals, replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. The L2 speakers’ overt productions, however, were significantly less consistent than those of the L1 speakers on the same task. We suggest that L2 speakers employ the same mechanisms for morphological encoding as L1 speakers, but with less reliance on grammatical constraints than L1 speakers.