The relationship between language production and verbal short-term memory: The role of stress grouping

This study investigates the influence of stress grouping on verbal short-term memory (STM). English speakers show a preference to combine syllables into trochaic groups, both lexically and in continuous speech. In two serial recall experiments, auditory lists of nonsense syllables were presented with either trochaic (STRONG-weak) or iambic (weak-STRONG) stress patterns, or in monotone. The acoustic correlates that carry stress were also manipulated in order to examine the relationship between input and output processes during recall. In Experiment 1, stressed and unstressed syllables differed in intensity and pitch but were matched for spoken duration. Significantly more syllables were recalled in the trochaic stress pattern condition than in the iambic and monotone conditions, which did not differ. In Experiment 2, spoken duration and pitch were manipulated but intensity was held constant. No effects of stress grouping were observed, suggesting that intensity is a critical acoustic factor for trochaic grouping. Acoustic analyses demonstrated that speech output was not identical to the auditory input, but that participants generated correct stress patterns by manipulating acoustic correlates in the same way in both experiments. These data challenge the idea of a language-independent STM store and support the notion of separable phonological input and output processes

Changing shape according to strength: Evidence from root allomorphy in Greek

In this article we examine patterns of root allomorphy in Greek that involve vowel alternations and propose a Generalized Non-linear Affixation (Bermúdez-Otero 2012) analysis according to which these alternations result from the competition between segments that belong, on the one hand, to the vocabulary items of roots and, on the other, to the exponents of functional heads (Voice/Aspect, n). More specifically, we claim that phonological entities have a gradient degree of presence in a structure, that is, are specified with a certain activation strength value underlyingly (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016). As a result, the surface realization of roots is determined by the relevant activation level of the exponents of functional heads they are eventually combined with. From all available exponents, the one that optimally complements the strength value of the vocabulary item of a given root will eventually surface. Our analysis is shown to be theoretically advantageous because it develops a strictly phonological account of allomorphy and, moreover, it captures the attested generalizations without resorting to extensive stem/span listing or to the application of phonologically unrestricted readjustment rules. © 2019

Case morphology and word order in second language Turkish: Evidence from Greek learners

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a 'surface' problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three experiments have been conducted, a cloze task, a sentence picture matching task and an on-line grammaticality judgement task, in order to investigate case morphology and its interaction with word order constraints. The findings of all three experiments point towards a variable use of case morphology, which is also observed in previous studies of Turkish as a second language (L2). Moreover, they show clearly that the learners face difficulties with non-canonical word orders as well as with the interaction of word order constraints and Case. On the other hand, the learners performed well on verbal inflections. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the developmental patterns in the early stages of L2 acquisition cannot be attributed to a global lack of functional categories but rather to more localized difficulties, which seem to be related to (a) whether the features in the L2 are grammaticalized in the first language and (b) the way these features are encoded in the morphosyntax of the first language. Moreover, we claim that processing factors and the specific properties of the morphological paradigms affect L2 development. © The Author(s) 2010

Word accent and mapping rules in Yurakaré

This paper looks in detail at stress assignment in the Bolivian isolate language Yurakaré, one of the few processes in the language that require the phonological-word (p-word) as its domain of application. In terms of stress assignment, the p-word in Yurakaré interacts not only with the morphological component, but also with the syntactic component. Moreover, morphological interference with the prosodic component seems to start below the level of the p-word. I argue that these complex, conditional mappings can be thought of as either structurally conditioned diachronic remnants of grammaticalized items or as functionally motivated peculiarities