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Abstract To efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English should avoid interpreting pitch‐contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the relevance of pitch at other levels of structure. Thus far, the developmental time‐course with which English‐learning children rule out pitch as a contrastive feature has been incompletely characterized. Prior studies have tested diverse lexical contrasts and have not tested beyond 30 months. To specify the developmental trajectory over a broader age range, we extended a prior study (Quam & Swingley, 2010), in which 30‐month‐olds and adults disregarded pitch changes, but attended to vowel changes, in newly learned words. Using the same phonological contrasts, we tested 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds, 24‐month‐olds, and 18‐month‐olds. The older two groups were tested using the language‐guided‐looking method. The oldest group attended to vowels but not pitch. Surprisingly, 24‐month‐olds ignored not just pitch but sometimes vowels as well—conflicting with prior findings of phonological constraint at 24 months. The youngest group was tested using the Switch habituation method, half with additional phonetic variability in training. Eighteen‐month‐olds learned both pitch‐contrasted and vowel‐contrasted words, whether or not additional variability was present. Thus, native‐language phonological constraint was not evidenced prior to 30 months (Quam & Swingley, 2010). We contextualize our findings within other recent work in this area.
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This content will become publicly available on July 10, 2026
Analogical change in Dinka vowel alternations
Abstract Verbs in Dinka (West Nilotic, Nilo-Saharan) are largely monosyllabic, but nonetheless the language displays a rich inventory of inflectional and derivational forms realized through alternations of the stem vowel with a morphomic distribution. The inflectional paradigm is driven by two complementary alternations which Andersen (1993, 2017) characterizes in phonological terms:fronting, which changes a stem vowel /a/ to /ɛ/, andlowering, which lowers or diphthongizes all other stem vowels. Both look like they might have been produced by the assimilatory effects of suffixes which have now been lost. While this is undoubtedly the case withlowering(Andersen, 1990), we argue thatfrontingwas due to morphological analogy,pacevan Urk and Chong (2022). Strikingly, the result was a vowel alternation pattern otherwise unattested in the verbal system, and whose resemblance to a phonologically conditioned change is purely coincidental. Our proposed reconstruction reveals two noteworthy and typologically unusual properties of this analogical change: (i) it operated on the overall system of morphophonological alternations, not on individual paradigms, and (ii) its output was determined by the phonological ambiguity of the analogical model, which we take to be a novel route towards the emergence of morphomes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2313787
- PAR ID:
- 10650794
- Publisher / Repository:
- Morphology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Morphology
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1871-5621
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 569 to 586
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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