No description available.

Modern Hebrew exhibits a derivational process known as Denominai Verb Formation (DVF) whereby a base form, usually a noun, may become a verb. This process has been analyzed by several researchers (Bat-El 1994, Gafos 1995, Sharvit 1994) but to date a comprehensive, principled account has not been proposed. In this paper, it is my aim to present such a principled account of DVF, within Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). This account crucially relies on the consonantal root, arguing against the proposal of Bat-El (1994) that the root plays no role in DVF. In addition, I propose to capture the well known effects of left-to-right spreading attested throughout Semitic (McCarthy 1979, 1981, et seq.) using a new form of Anchor constraints. These new Anchor constraints will be useful in accounting for cases of consonant doubling, which is attested in a subset of Modern Hebrew denominai verbs. Finally, I show that Bat-El's (1994) arguments against the consonantal root can be recast as reasons to adopt a separate dimension of correspondence relations in the analysis: namely, the dimension of Output-Output Correspondence, following work of, e.g., Benua (1995, 1997) and Burzio (1996).

No description available.

This thesis deals with the nature and definition of phonological similarity and shows that, when similarity plays a role in the motivation of phonological processes, it is evaluated over abstract, phonological features and not purely phonetic properties. Empirical evidence for this position is drawn from the domain of consonant harmony. Typological studies of consonant harmony (Hansson 2001, Rose and Walker 2004) have argued that segments which interact in consonant harmony processes must be highly similar to one another. This thesis provides analyses of a range of consonant harmony processes and demonstrates that, in each case, the notion of similarity needed in order to determine participating segments is evaluated over contrastive feature specifications. Contrastive specifications are established according to language-specific feature hierarchies (Jackobson and Halle 1956, Dresher 2003, forthcoming) with some features taking scope over others. Languages analyzed in some detail include Bumo Izon, Kalabari Ijo, Hausa, Dholuo, Anywa, Tzutujil and Aymara. Two definitions of similarity are proposed in order to account for two sets of cases. In one set of consonant harmony processes, interacting segments are similar in the sense that they constitute the natural class of segments contrastively specified in the harmonic feature. In another set of cases, participating segments must be similar according to the following definition; they must differ in only a single marked and contrastive feature specification.

Deficits in phonology are among the most common and persistent impairments in aphasia after left hemisphere stroke, and can have significant functional consequences for spoken and written language. While many individuals make considerable gains through physiological restitution and in response to treatment, the neural substrates supporting phonological performance in the face of damage to critical language regions is poorly understood. To address this issue, we used BOLD fMRI to measure regional brain activation in a case series of individuals with aphasia after left MCA stroke during a phonological task. The results of this study support the idea that damage to even a portion of the phonological network results in impaired phonological processing. We found that individuals with left perisylvian damage tend to rely on the residual left-hemisphere language network, and typically recruit regions associated with domain-general cognitive processing which fall outside of the left-hemisphere language network. However, recruitment of these regions did not necessarily enhance phonological processing. Rather, more successful phonological processing outside the scanner was associated with recruitment of a language region in right posterior middle temporal gyrus and a region in left occipital pole. More successful phonological processing inside the scanner was associated with additional recruitment of the left supramarginal gyrus within the healthy control network, engagement of bilateral intraparietal sulcus from the multi-demand network, and up-regulation of the right-hemisphere network of regions homotopic to the left-hemisphere language network seen in the healthy control group. These findings emphasize the contributions of residual components of the left-hemisphere language network, engagement of a non-linguistic domain-general multi-demand network, and the participation of the non-dominant right-hemisphere language network in successful phonological processing in chronic aphasia after stroke.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

AC2017

This dissertation explores the relationship between English phonotactics – sequential dependencies between adjacent segments – and the metrical parse, which relies on the division of words into syllables. Most current theories of syllabification operate under the assumption that the phonotactic restrictions which co-determine syllable boundaries are constrained by word edges. For example, a syllable can never begin with a consonant sequence that is not also attested as a word onset. This view of phonotactics as categorical is outdated: for several decades now, psycholinguistic research employing monosyllables has shown that phonotactic knowledge is gradient, and that this gradience is projected from the lexicon and possibly also based on differences in sonority among consonants located at word margins. This dissertation is an attempt to reconcile syllabification theory with this modern view of phonotactics. In what follows, I propose and defend a gradient metrical parsing model which assigns English syllable boundaries as a probabilistic function of the well-formedness relations that obtain between potential syllable onsets and offsets. I argue that this well-formedness is subserved by the same sources already established in the phonotactic literature: probabilistic generalizations over the word edges as well as sonority. In support of my proposal, I provide experimental evidence from five sources: (1) a pseudoword hyphenation experiment, (2) a reanalysis of a well-known, large-scale hyphenation study using real English words, (3) a forced-choice preference task employing nonwords presented as minimal stress pairs, (4) an online stress assignment experiment, and (5) a study of the speech errors committed by the participants of (4). The results of all studies converge in support of the gradient parsing model and correlate significantly with each other. Subsequent computer simulations suggest that the gradient model is preferred to the categorical alternative throughout all stages of lexical acquisition. This dissertation contains co-authored material accepted for publication.