/u/-fronting and /æ/-raising in Toronto families

This paper examines the acquisition of both stable contextual variation and a change in progress by children aged four to twelve. Comparing children and their parents from 19 families, we investigate whether transmission and incrementation effects (Labov 2001, 2007) can be found in two vowel variables in Toronto English: /ae/-raising, a case of stable allophony, and /u/-fronting, an ongoing change. In /u/-fronting, children are extending the change to new, previously non-fronted environments. However, analysis does not reveal the expected incrementation pattern in which older children are more advanced. Instead we find the opposite: the youngest children are most advanced in the change, while the oldest are the most conservative, having retreated closer to the adult norm but still crucially further forward, allowing the change to progress. In the case of /ae/-raising, children are not extending the variation to new environments. Younger children do consistently overshoot the placement of /ae/ in raising environments, while older children appear to have retreated and stabilized in the same range as their parents, maintaining the contextual variation at the community level. We suggest that these patterns could be viewed as a kind of overgeneralization, similar to what is often seen in morphological acquisition

Introduction to Volume 37

The TWPL committee is pleased to present Volume 37, our first special issue since the journal’s revival earlier this year. This short edition features recent work by four alumni of the University of Toronto across four different subfields: one in phonology, one in syntax, one in language acquisition, and one in language variation and change. Each paper makes a valuable contribution to linguistic inquiry, and we are honoured to have the opportunity to deliver this exciting work to the public.We would like to thank the supportive members of the UofT linguistics department for their help in breathing new life into the journal. We would also like to thank all the authors who submitted to TWPL this year, since without their research efforts that fill the pages of this and previous issues, our continued momentum would not have been possible. We hope that this volume will continue the process of re-building TWPL as a publication venue for innovative work in all areas of linguistics

Frontmatter

Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics would like to acknowledge the sacred land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.As 2017 marks 150 years of Canadian federation, the citizens of Canada were invited to share in a number of celebratory events across the country. However, the TWPL editorial team felt compelled to resist the celebration of these lands’ colonial legacy. As a small way of doing so, we planned a volume of research dedicated to the Indigenous languages spoken here – research that is with and for Indigenous languages and speakers. We hoped not only to recognize the greatest linguistic change that has taken place on the land we now call Canada – that is, the intentional and systematic genocide of Indigenous languages by colonial settlers – but importantly, to recognize and celebrate these languages, including their speakers and their champions, in the here and now. The Indigenous languages spoken here are not artifacts of the past, and we wanted to draw attention to the incredible linguistic work taking place in these communities.The erasure of Indigenous languages is a worldwide issue; as such, we welcomed research on languages spoken outside of what is now Canada and are pleased to include an article on Indigenous languages of Australia, with whom we acknowledge our shared colonial history.The work in this volume spans language families. It investigates these languages from semantic, syntactic, phonological, and historical perspectives. The data come from a range of fieldwork methodologies, and the analyses make important theoretical contributions to our field. We are very grateful to our contributors for their dedication to this research, and for being willing to share it with us. Yet, we acknowledge that what we have produced is a volume of research mostly by scholars of settler heritage. This is not what we foresaw when we set out to put together this issue, but it is something for which we must accept responsibility. It brought to our attention the shortcomings of our field in engaging Indigenous people as researchers, and our own failures in reaching a diverse audience in general.For the future of the journal, we would like to present a few actionable items. First, we will include a statement of equity in all of our calls for papers indicating our commitment to publishing the work of scholars from equity-seeking communities. We will also begin developing stronger connections with Indigenous linguists and scholars from Indigenous Studies departments, both at the University of Toronto and elsewhere. Finally, we recommend that all researchers consider the role that their community consultants play in their research profile and the implications for who is considered “experts” on Indigenous languages, and to think about the ways in which we can share our platform.This process has been humbling. We hope that by dedicating this volume to languages that have been threatened by colonialism, we are taking our own small step in the direction of reconciliation, but clearly, that is not enough. Above all, we are grateful for the opportunity to draw attention to how much more remains to be done. Moving forward, we ask for your help in changing the landscape of linguistic research around the world by making space for the voices of historically silenced communities. Sincerely,Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics editorial tea

Introduction to Volume 35

We are pleased to introduce the 35th volume of Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics. This volume comes after a considerable gap in TWPL’s publishing history. We sincerely thank the authors of the articles included in this volume for their patience and their commitment to TWPL as the venue of publication for their work. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the previous editorial team. Without their initial achievements, our efforts to revive TWPL would not have succeeded. We are proud to continue their legacy.It is our sincere hope that this revival of TWPL will not be a short-lived endeavour. Plans are already underway for upcoming volumes that highlight current work being done at the University of Toronto and beyond. Our hope is that we will again become a respected repository of work on all linguistic issues the field is grappling with today. We thank our readers for their dedication to our publication and we invite you to join us in looking forward to the future of TWPL.In gratitude,Ruth Maddeaux (Editor)Peter Jurgec (Faculty Coordinator

Foreword

This special issue of TWPL is a collection of papers presented at the annual Canada Research Chair (CRC) summer workshop in phonology and phonetics in recent years. 2017 marked the 10th year in the workshop series and the organizing committee felt that it was high time for such a collection. This workshop series is just one of the many departmental events and activities generously supported by Keren Rice’s CRC fund over her 14 years of CRC tenure.Since 2007, the workshop has featured over 130 paper presentations. As the workshop was initially conceived as a local research forum, most of these papers were presented by graduate students and faculty of the Linguistics department. At least one third of the presentations, however, were by students and faculty from other University of Toronto departments (including Speech Language Pathology, Spanish and Portuguese, and Psychology at University of Toronto Mississauga) and from other institutions (including York University, Tyndale University College, and St. Mary’s University). This, together with an increasing involvement of undergraduate students, has served to create ample opportunities for research training and to develop a stimulating environment for cross-pollination of research ideas and methods.  This special TWPL issue serves as a token of our appreciation of the contribution Keren’s CRC made to the department and to the University of Toronto phonetics/phonology research community. Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, and Ruth MaddeauxOn behalf of the CRC workshop organizing committee and the TWPL editorial tea

Effects of Prior Mention and Task Goals on Language Processing

This paper investigates the processing of linguistic elements whose interpretation depends on retrieving information that was available earlier in the situation. Using the visual-world paradigm, we examine the processing of the verb return, which requires that an object has previously moved. We manipulated whether the moved object (and the movement itself) was described using language, by its typical label or by its location, or whether it was seen moving without that movement being labeled. We also manipulated whether the instructions were positive (e.g., Return the X), therefore requiring the listener to perform an action, or negative (e.g., Don’t return the X), which required no action. Results reveal a sensitivity to how information was introduced. Most importantly, with positive instructions, the naming of the object did not have an effect, whereas with negative instructions, naming was important to interpretation. These results indicate that the way information is introduced affects the status of this information when it is retrieved; these findings also lead us to explicitly consider the hypotheses that link language processing and visual attention