The double identity of linguistic doubling

Cognition, 2017

Duality of patterning, is, by hypothesis, a universal design feature of language. Every language constructs words from meaningful units (morphemes), which, in turn, are comprised of meaningless phonological elements (e.g., segments, syllables). But whether the language faculty does, in fact, include a separate morphological level, distinct from the phonology, is a matter of controversy. To elucidate the role of morphology, here we ask whether morphological forms are constrained by putatively universal combinatorial principles, distinct from those applying to phonological patterns. Our research exploits the structural ambiguity of doubling. Doubling (e.g., trafraf) is open to two competing interpretations-as either a purely phonological form, or as a complex morphological structure that is systematically linked to meaning (e.g., trafraf is the diminutive of traf). Our experiments show that responses to doubling (trafraf) shift radically, depending on its level of analysis. Viewed as a meaningless phonological form, doubling is dispreferred irrespective of its kind (i.e., trafraf is as bad as traftaf, even though the latter violates a morphological constraint on contiguity). But once doubling is systematically linked to meaning (i.e., as a morphological structure), the doubling dislike shifts into a reliable preference, and an additional constraint on its contiguity arises (i.e., trafraf > traftaf). Remarkably, the dissociation between morphological and phonological doubling emerges regardless of whether morphological reduplication is abundant in participants' language (in Hebrew) or relatively rare (in English). These results suggest the existence of distinct linguistic constraints that preferentially target the morphological vs. phonological levels. We discuss various explanations for the origins of these restrictions.

Cognitive Science

Does knowledge of language transfer across language modalities? For example, can speakers who have had no sign language experience spontaneously project grammatical principles of English to American Sign Language (ASL) signs? To address this question, here, we explore a grammatical illusion. Using spoken language, we first show that a single word with doubling (e.g., trafraf) can elicit conflicting linguistic responses, depending on the level of linguistic analysis (phonology vs. morphology). We next show that speakers with no command of a sign language extend these same principles to novel ASL signs. Remarkably, the morphological analysis of ASL signs depends on the morphology of participants' spoken language. Speakers of Malayalam (a language with rich reduplicative morphology) prefer XX signs when doubling signals morphological plurality, whereas no such preference is seen in speakers of Mandarin (a language with no productive plural morphology). Our conclusions open up the possibility that some linguistic principles are amodal and abstract.

Cognitive Science, 2006

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f-s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual targets following auditory primes. Critical materials were minimal pairs that could be a word with either [f] or [s] (cf. English knife-nice), none of which had been heard in training. Listeners interpreted the minimal pair words differently in the second phase according to the training received in the first phase. Therefore, lexically mediated retuning of phoneme perception not only influences categorical decisions about fricatives (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003), but also benefits recognition of words outside the training set. The observed generalization across words suggests that this retuning occurs prelexically. Therefore, lexical processing involves sublexical phonological abstraction, not only accumulation of acoustic episodes.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008

Do speakers know universal restrictions on linguistic elements that are absent from their language? We report an experimental test of this question. Our case study concerns the universal restrictions on initial consonant sequences, onset clusters (e.g., bl in block ). Across languages, certain onset clusters (e.g., lb ) are dispreferred (e.g., systematically under-represented) relative to others (e.g., bl ). We demonstrate such preferences among Korean speakers, whose language lacks initial C 1 C 2 clusters altogether. Our demonstration exploits speakers' well known tendency to misperceive ill-formed clusters. We show that universally dispreferred onset clusters are more frequently misperceived than universally preferred ones, indicating that Korean speakers consider the former cluster-type more ill-formed. The misperception of universally ill-formed clusters is unlikely to be due to a simple auditory failure. Likewise, the aversion of universally dispreferred onsets by Korean s...

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2008

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a "moving target" both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG-the mesh between learners and languages-arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent "organism," which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2006

& Performance-based studies on the psychological nature of linguistic competence can conceal significant differences in the brain processes that underlie native versus nonnative knowledge of language. Here we report results from the brain activity of very proficient early bilinguals making a lexical decision task that illustrates this point. Two groups of Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals (Spanish-dominant and Catalan-dominant) were asked to decide whether a given form was a Catalan word or not. The nonwords were based on real words, with one vowel changed. In the experimental stimuli, the vowel change involved a Catalan-specific contrast that previous research had shown to be difficult for Spanish natives to perceive. In the control stimuli, the vowel switch involved contrasts common to Spanish and Catalan. The results indicated that the groups of bilinguals did not differ in their behavioral and event-related brain potential measurements for the control stimuli; both groups made very few errors and showed a larger N400 component for control nonwords than for control words. However, significant differences were observed for the experimental stimuli across groups: Specifically, Spanish-dominant bilinguals showed great difficulty in rejecting experimental nonwords. Indeed, these participants not only showed very high error rates for these stimuli, but also did not show an error-related negativity effect in their erroneous nonword decisions. However, both groups of bilinguals showed a larger correctrelated negativity when making correct decisions about the experimental nonwords. The results suggest that although some aspects of a second language system may show a remarkable lack of plasticity (like the acquisition of some foreign contrasts), first-language representations seem to be more dynamic in their capacity of adapting and incorporating new information. &

Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2011

Recent research has demonstrated that systematic mappings between phonological word forms and their meanings can facilitate language learning (e.g., in the form of sound symbolism or cues to grammatical categories). Yet, paradoxically from a learning viewpoint, most words have an arbitrary form-meaning mapping. We hypothesized that this paradox may reflect a division of labor between 2 different language learning functions: arbitrariness facilitates learning specific word meanings and systematicity facilitates learning to group words into categories. In a series of computational investigations and artificial language learning studies, we varied the extent to which the language was arbitrary or systematic. For both the simulations and the behavioral studies, we found that the optimal structure of the vocabulary for learning incorporated this division of labor. Corpus analyses of English and French indicate that these predicted patterns are also found in natural languages.

Neuroscience Letters, 2011

Cortex, 2018

There is considerable behavioral evidence that morphologically complex words such as 'tax-able' and 'kiss-es' are processed and represented combinatorially. In other words, they are decomposed into their constituents 'tax' and '-able' during comprehension (reading or listening), and producing them might also involve onetheespot combination of these constituents (especially for inflections). However, despite increasing amount of neurocognitive research, the neural mechanisms underlying these processes are still not fully understood. The purpose of this critical review is to offer a comprehensive overview on the state-of-the-art of the research on the neural mechanisms of morphological processing. In order to take into account all types of complex words, we include findings on inflected, derived, and compound words presented both visually and aurally. More specifically, we cover a wide range of electro-and magnetoencephalography (EEG and MEG, respectively) as well as structural/functional magnetic resonance imaging (s/fMRI) studies that focus on morphological processing. We present the findings with respect to the temporal course and localization of morphologically complex word processing. We summarize the observed findings, their interpretations with respect to current psycholinguistic models, and discuss methodological approaches as well as their possible limitations.