Comparing phoneme frequency, age of acquisition, and loss in aphasia:Implications for phonological universals

Phonological complexity may be central to the nature of human language. It may shape the distribution of phonemes and phoneme sequences within languages, but also determine age of acquisition and susceptibility to loss in aphasia. We evaluated this claim using frequency statistics derived from a corpus of phonologically transcribed Italian words (phonitalia, available at phonitalia,org), rankings of phoneme age of acquisition (AoA) and rate of phoneme errors in patients with apraxia of speech (AoS) as an indication of articulatory complexity. These measures were related to cross-linguistically derived markedness rankings. We found strong correspondences. AoA, however, was predicted by both apraxic errors and frequency, suggesting independent contributions of these variables. Our results support the reality of universal principles of complexity. In addition they suggest that these complexity principles have articulatory underpinnings since they modulate the production of patients with AoS, but not the production of patients with more central phonological difficulties

Schemas for Unordered XML on a DIME

We investigate schema languages for unordered XML having no relative order among siblings. First, we propose unordered regular expressions (UREs), essentially regular expressions with unordered concatenation instead of standard concatenation, that define languages of unordered words to model the allowed content of a node (i.e., collections of the labels of children). However, unrestricted UREs are computationally too expensive as we show the intractability of two fundamental decision problems for UREs: membership of an unordered word to the language of a URE and containment of two UREs. Consequently, we propose a practical and tractable restriction of UREs, disjunctive interval multiplicity expressions (DIMEs). Next, we employ DIMEs to define languages of unordered trees and propose two schema languages: disjunctive interval multiplicity schema (DIMS), and its restriction, disjunction-free interval multiplicity schema (IMS). We study the complexity of the following static analysis problems: schema satisfiability, membership of a tree to the language of a schema, schema containment, as well as twig query satisfiability, implication, and containment in the presence of schema. Finally, we study the expressive power of the proposed schema languages and compare them with yardstick languages of unordered trees (FO, MSO, and Presburger constraints) and DTDs under commutative closure. Our results show that the proposed schema languages are capable of expressing many practical languages of unordered trees and enjoy desirable computational properties.Comment: Theory of Computing System

Spraakmakende ontwikkelingen

Oratie uitgesproken door Prof.dr. Janet Grijzenhout bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de Engelse Taalkunde aan de Universiteit Leiden op maandag 19 maart 2018Oratie uitgesproken door Prof.dr. Janet Grijzenhout bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de Engelse Taalkunde aan de Universiteit Leiden op maandag 19 maart 2018Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Syllabic Markedness, Segmental Markedness, Rhythm and Acquisition

Contains fulltext : 57168.pdf (author's version ) (Open Access)[Thessaloniki] GLOW 2004, 18 april 200

The rise and fall of front rounded in English

Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Sources and style: from the art of reality to the reality of art

No abstract