Consonant repetition ("reduplication") predominates in #CVC sequences in babbling and early words, gradually giving way to consonant variation ("variegation") with a "Fronting" pattern whereby the first consonant has a more anterior place of articulation than the second. The various reduplicative patterns are primarily attributed to a "Frame" consisting of rhythmic mandibular oscillation. Evide...

Broken sidewalks have become an important legal issue since 2002 when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act ADA applies to sidewalks. As one way to comply with the ADA, cities can require property owners to repair any broken sidewalk fronting their property before they sell the property. Before any real estate is sold, the city i...

This study examines the effect of smiling on GOAT fronting, a sound change common to many varieties of American English. The data are audiovisual recordings of ten speakers of American English recorded in dyadic conversations in an interactional sociophonetics laboratory. We applied an existing computer vision algorithm for smile detection to the video recordings to identify smiling intervals. ...

This study examined articulatory composition of the Korean liquid in the phonological contexts that condition its allophony using real-time MRI. During the liquid, tongue tip constriction, tongue body raising and tongue root fronting motions were observed. Inter-vocalic liquids (flap percept) were produced with shorter tongue tip movement duration and smaller displacement than onset or coda liq...

Jason Merchant (2004, and Chap. 3, this volume) proposes to account for all speech acts performed with “fragments,” whether in discourse-initial position or otherwise, by appealing to syntactic ellipsis. Though his proposal is insightful, I offer empirical and methodological considerations against it. Empirical problems include: (a) His alleged “elliptical sentences” do not embed the way they s...

This research focuses on the identification and characterisation of accents in French. For both foreign and regional accents, we started with perceptual identification experiments, we measured phonetic features which may characterise these accents using automatic phoneme alignment, and we ranked the most discriminating features by using classification techniques. The following features are perc...

Defaka allows optional fronting of one XP in a clause; this fronting carries with it some type of discourse prominence, and is taken here to be a process of focus movement. Interestingly, this movement can trigger special morphology in two different places, depending on what kind of phrase is focused. This results in two asymmetries between subjects and other types of phrases. First, focused lo...

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses of child-directed speech showing that there is ...

MCGEE VICTORIA: Ethnic identity, language, and /o/ fronting among Latinos at UNC Chapel Hill (Under the direction of David Mora Marín) This study focuses on the variety of English used by college students at UNC Chapel Hill who self-identify as Latino and the relationship between the social and linguistic categories governing the speech of this particular group. The study will reveal, through c...

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives. We develop a series of child-directed corpus analyses showing that there is indirect statistical inf...