http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/bling/rss Recent eScholarship items from Department of Linguistics Thu, 2 Jul 2026 02:10:19 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xq9m6nm Nasality in Atchan: Synchrony, diachrony and typologyNasality in Atchan: Synchrony, diachrony and typology https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xq9m6nm Wed, 1 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Russell, Katherine R https://escholarship.org/uc/item/52n5q1m9 You had to be there: The Pragmatics of Improvisational Joking in Relation to a Sociolinguistic Theory of Conversation https://escholarship.org/uc/item/52n5q1m9 Wed, 1 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Davies, Catherine E https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mm476qk The digitization and computational processing of Holocaust testimony interviews are essential for the long-term preservation and accessibility of survivors’ narratives. However, automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Yiddish—the primary language of most Holocaust victims and survivors—remains underdeveloped. This paper introduces the first ASR system for European Yiddish, focused on the Northeastern ("Lithuanian") dialect and trained on Holocaust survivor testimonies from the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (42 hours of speech segments from 60 survivors). A systematic comparison of CTC-based ASR models using transcripts with different orthographic representations reveals that a Hebrew-based phonemic system with precomposed Unicode is optimal, achieving a mean WER of 37.96% compared to 59.40% WER for romanized Yiddish and 99.67% WER (catastrophic failure) for standard Yiddish spelled with decomposed Unicode. Cross-domain testing on Yiddish audiobooks provides additional support... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0mm476qk Wed, 3 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Bleaman, Isaac L https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0410-7369 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mr5153m Sexuality, gender, and the voice in (Bay Area) English https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mr5153m Mon, 1 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Galvano, Amber https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ss4m3zn Aspects of Tone in Cua https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ss4m3zn Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Wellstood, Zachary CP https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vp597r1 The circumflex advancement is usually dated after the loss of the weak jers. However, this chronology has been questioned by Vermeer (1979) and Greenberg (1992, 1993), who claim the opposite: that the weak jers were lost after the advancement. They further propose the “non-advancement rule”, by which the circumflex does not advance if a weak jer follows. Their evidence comes almost exclusively from the l-participles of the accentual paradigm c, which have the initial accent in the two dialects. The article presents new data that argue against this proposal. It is shown that the circumflex regularly advances in words outside the category of l-participles despite the presence of a subsequent weak jer. Moreover, a new explanation is given for the initial accent in l-participles that better captures the data. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vp597r1 Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63c8x8wv Discontinuous vowel harmony in Guébie: Cyclic interleaving of syntax and phonology https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63c8x8wv Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Sande, Hannah https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1335-8717 Clem, Emily Dabkowski, Maksymilian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qj4w97m One of the most widely studied observations in linguistic phonetics is that, all else being equal, vowels are longer before voiced than before voiceless obstruents. The causes of this phonetic generalization are, however, poorly understood and several competing explanations have been proposed. No studies have so far measured vowel duration before stops with yet another laryngeal feature: ejectives. This study fills this gap and presents results from an experiment that measures vowel duration before stops with all three laryngeal features in Georgian and models effects of both closure and voice onset time (VOT) on preceding vowel duration at the same time. The results show that vowels have significantly different durations before all three series of stops, voiced, ejective, and voiceless aspirated, even when closure and VOT durations are controlled for. The results also suggest that closure and VOT durations are inversely correlated with preceding vowel duration. These results... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qj4w97m Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/782175wm Distinguishing cognitive influences from historical influences on human behavior has long been a disputed topic in behavioral sciences, including linguistics. The discussion is often complicated due to empirical evidence being consistent with both the cognitive and the historical approach. This article argues that phonology offers a unique test case for distinguishing historical and cognitive influences on grammar, and it proposes an experimental technique for testing the cognitive factor which controls for the historical factor. The article outlines a model called CATALYSIS for explaining how learnability influences phonological typology and presents experiments that simulate this process. Central to this discussion are unnatural phonological processes, that is, those that operate against universal phonetic tendencies and require complex historical trajectories in order to arise. By using statistical methods for estimating historical influences, mismatches in predictions between... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/782175wm Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02f674pg In this paper I propose a new rule of Vedic meter. The glides *v and *y are regularly lost before the corresponding high vowels ū̆ and ̆ī in Vedic. I argue that the word-initial glides *v and *y before the short vowels ŭ and ĭ still “make position” and that they should be restored for metrical purposes. This means that word-final syllables of the shape -V̆ C should be scanned long if the following syllable begins with a u- or i- that goes back to *vu- or *yi-. This new rule has consequences for the general metrical shape of the Rigveda, as cadences previously scanned as irregular will be repaired to their canonical shape. The rule can also be employed as etymologically decisive for words that can potentially go back to forms with or without an initial glide. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02f674pg Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06q6h6bx The field of cultural NLP has recently experienced rapid growth, driven by a pressing need to ensure that language technologies are effective and safe across a pluralistic user base. This work has largely progressed without a shared conception of culture, instead choosing to rely on a wide array of cultural proxies. However, this leads to a number of recurring limitations: coarse national boundaries fail to capture nuanced differences that lay within them, limited coverage restricts datasets to only a subset of usually highly-represented cultures, and a lack of dynamicity results in static cultural benchmarks that do not change as culture evolves. In this position paper, we argue that these methodological limitations are symptomatic of a theoretical gap. We draw on a well-developed theory of culture from sociocultural linguistics to fill this gap by 1) demonstrating in a case study how it can clarify methodological constraints and affordances, 2) offering theoretically-motivated... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06q6h6bx Thu, 7 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Zhou, Naitian Bamman, David Bleaman, Isaac L https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mt8q6xm Wild cetacean birth observations are extremely rare, with observations having been recorded in less than 10% of cetacean species. Here, we describe a detailed accounting of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) birth off the coast of Dominica within a well-documented social unit and consisted of sperm whales collaboratively lifting the newborn out of the water. We recorded data via multiple concurrent methods: underwater audio, aerial drone video, shipboard photography in addition to behavioral observations spanning before, during and after the whale birth. All 11 members from sperm whale “Unit A” were present and participated in the birth, which lasted 34&nbsp;min from the time the flukes emerged until the completion of delivery. The sperm whale unit made extensive vocalizations, with statistically significant shifts in coda vocal style corresponding to key events, such as the beginning of the birth and interactions with short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8mt8q6xm Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Aluma, Yaniv Baron, Zethra Barrett, Ricardo Baumgartner, Courtney Beguš, Gašper Bhattacharya, Sushmita Bronstein, Michael M Dahan, Shlomi Davis, Oscar de Haas, Sarah Defoe, Jullan DelPreto, Joseph Dessi, Roberto Diamant, Roee Gatesy, John George, Kevin Gero, Shane Gibbons, Darren Gibbons, Dean Gil, Stephanie Goldwasser, Shafi Gruber, David F Harve, Odel Hernandez, Alyssa Ishay, Mapal Jadhav, Ninad KC, Lakshyana Kenny, Aidan Leitao, Antonio Lucas, Maxime Maalouf, Alaa Malkin, Peter Mevorach, Yaly Pagani, Stefano Paradise, Orr Petri, Giovanni Poetto, Simone Rossi, Emanuele Rus, Daniela Salino-Hugg, Michael Santoro, Andrea Sharma, Pratyusha Tchernov, Dan Torralba, Antonio Tønnesen, Pernille Vogt, Daniel M Wood, Robert J https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19c6597p Sperm whales (Physeter macro-cephalus) communicate using series of clicks known as codas. In previous research, sperm whale codas have been shown to resemble human vowels acoustically. Based on the number of formants, two different coda quality categories have been described: a-codas and i-codas. In the present paper, we demonstrate that sperm whale codas not only resemble human vowels acoustically but also pattern like them along several linguistic dimensions. First, traditional count- and timing-based coda types interact with coda 'vowel' quality (a versus i). Second, a-codas are generally longer than i-codas. Third, the duration of i-codas has a bimodal distribution, showing a contrast between short i-codas and long ī-codas. Fourth, the baseline coda length differs across whales. And fifth, edge clicks mismatching their coda often match an adjacent coda, a phenomenon that resembles human coarticulation. All five properties have close parallels in the phonetics and phonology... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19c6597p Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper Dąbkowski, Maksymilian Sprouse, Ronald L Gruber, David F Gero, Shane https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g96t6vq The performance of large language models (LLMs) has recently improved to the point where models can perform well on many language tasks. We show here that—for the first time—the models can also generate valid metalinguistic analyses of language data. We outline a research program where the behavioral interpretability of LLMs on these tasks is tested via prompting. LLMs are trained primarily on text—as such, evaluating their metalinguistic abilities improves our understanding of their general capabilities and sheds new light on theoretical models in linguistics. We show that OpenAI’s [56] o1 vastly outperforms other models on tasks involving drawing syntactic trees and phonological generalization. We speculate that OpenAI o1’s unique advantage over other models may result from the model’s chain-of-thought mechanism, which mimics the structure of human reasoning used in complex cognitive tasks, such as linguistic analysis. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g96t6vq Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, G https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6459-0551 Dąbkowski, M https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3414-4726 Rhodes, R https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3397-2012 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m941875 Final nasalization of voiced stops is phonetically unmotivated (i.e. not a consequence of universal articulatory or perceptual tendencies). As such, final nasalization has been deemed an impossible sound change. Nonetheless, Blust (2005; 2016) proposes that final nasalization took place in four Austronesian languages: Kayan-Murik, Berawan dialects, Kalabakan Murut, and Karo Batak. In this paper, we argue final nasalization in these languages is not a single sound change and reduce it to a combination of phonetically grounded changes. We demonstrate that in Austronesian, final nasalization involved four steps: (i) fricativization of voiced stops, (ii) devoicing of the fricatives, (iii) spontaneous nasalization before voiceless fricatives, and (iv) occlusion of the nasalized fricatives to nasal stops. Finally, we extend our account to final nasalization in Dakota (Siouan) and propose a new explanation for the development of the unnatural final voicing in the related Lakota language.... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m941875 Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Dabkowski, Maksymilian Begus, Gasper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92k5g02v Abstract This paper models unsupervised learning of an identity-based pattern (or copying) in speech called reduplication from raw continuous data with deep convolutional neural networks. We use the ciwGAN architecture (Beguš, 2021a) in which learning of meaningful representations in speech emerges from a requirement that the CNNs generate informative data. We propose a technique to wug-test CNNs trained on speech and, based on four generative tests, argue that the network learns to represent an identity-based pattern in its latent space. By manipulating only two categorical variables in the latent space, we can actively turn an unreduplicated form into a reduplicated form with no other substantial changes to the output in the majority of cases. We also argue that the network extends the identity-based pattern to unobserved data. Exploration of how meaningful representations of identity-based patterns emerge in CNNs and how the latent space variables outside of the training range... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92k5g02v Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zb903nb How can deep neural networks encode information that corresponds to words in human speech into raw acoustic data? This paper proposes two neural network architectures for modeling unsupervised lexical learning from raw acoustic inputs: ciwGAN (Categorical InfoWaveGAN) and fiwGAN (Featural InfoWaveGAN). These combine Deep Convolutional GAN architecture for audio data (WaveGAN; Donahue et&nbsp;al., 2019) with the information theoretic extension of GAN - InfoGAN (Chen et&nbsp;al., 2016) - and propose a new latent space structure that can model featural learning simultaneously with a higher level classification and allows for a very low-dimension vector representation of lexical items. In addition to the Generator and Discriminator networks, the architectures introduce a network that learns to retrieve latent codes from generated audio outputs. Lexical learning is thus modeled as emergent from an architecture that forces a deep neural network to output data such that unique information... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8zb903nb Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/79n5k5hr Generative deep neural networks are widely used for speech synthesis, but most existing models directly generate waveforms or spectral outputs. Humans, however, produce speech by controlling articulators, which results in the production of speech sounds through physical properties of sound propagation. We introduce the Articulatory Generator to the Generative Adversarial Network paradigm, a new unsupervised generative model of speech production/synthesis. The Articulatory Generator more closely mimics human speech production by learning to generate articulatory representations (electromagnetic articulography or EMA) in a fully unsupervised manner. A separate pre-trained physical model (ema2wav) then transforms the generated EMA representations to speech waveforms, which get sent to the Discriminator for evaluation. Articulatory analysis suggests that the network learns to control articulators in a similar manner to humans during speech production. Acoustic analysis of the outputs... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/79n5k5hr Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper Zhou, Alan Wu, Peter Anumanchipalli, Gopala K https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9714-7740 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gs9707b Human speakers encode information into raw speech which is then decoded by the listeners. This complex relationship between encoding (production) and decoding (perception) is often modeled separately. Here, we test how encoding and decoding of lexical semantic information can emerge automatically from raw speech in unsupervised generative deep convolutional networks that combine the production and perception principles of speech. We introduce, to our knowledge, the most challenging objective in unsupervised lexical learning: a network that must learn unique representations for lexical items with no direct access to training data. We train several models (ciwGAN and fiwGAN [1]) and test how the networks classify acoustic lexical items in unobserved test data. Strong evidence in favor of lexical learning and a causal relationship between latent codes and meaningful sublexical units emerge. The architecture that combines the production and perception principles is thus able to learn... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gs9707b Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Begus, Gasper https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6459-0551 Zhou, Alan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5d6786kb This paper presents a technique for estimating the influences of channel bias on phonological typology. The technique, based on statistical bootstrapping, enables the estimation of historical probability, the probability that a synchronic alternation arises based on two diachronic factors: the number of sound changes required for an alternation to arise and their respective probabilities. I estimate historical probabilities of six attested and unattested alternations targeting the feature [voice], compare historical probabilities of these alternations, perform inferential statistics on the comparison and, to evaluate the performance of the channel bias approach, compare outputs of the diachronic model against the independently observed synchronic typology. The technique also identifies mismatches between the typological predictions of the analytic bias and channel bias approaches. By comparing these mismatches with the observed typology, this paper attempts to quantitatively evaluate... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5d6786kb Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wv0x6h0 This paper presents a technique to interpret and visualize intermediate layers in generative CNNs trained on raw speech data in an unsupervised manner. We argue that averaging over feature maps after ReLU activation in each transpose convolutional layer yields interpretable time-series data. This technique allows for acoustic analysis of intermediate layers that parallels the acoustic analysis of human speech data: we can extract F0, intensity, duration, formants, and other acoustic properties from intermediate layers in order to test where and how CNNs encode various types of information. We further combine this technique with linear interpolation of a model's latent space to show a causal relationship between individual variables in the latent space and activations in a model's intermediate convolutional layers. In particular, observing the causal effect between linear interpolation and the resulting changes in intermediate layers can reveal how individual latent variables get... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wv0x6h0 Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Begu, Gaper Zhou, Alan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kz653ds Abstract The development of voiced sibilants is a long‐standing puzzle in Indo‐Iranian historical phonology. In Vedic, all voiced sibilants are lost from the system, but the details of this loss are complex and subject to debate. The most intriguing development concerns the word‐final ‐ aḥ to ‐ o in sandhi. This paper presents a new account of the development of voiced sibilants from the Proto‐Indo‐Iranian period to Vedic with a special emphasis on Iranian comparative data. I propose a new explanation for the peculiar development of word‐final voiced fricatives and motivate the new proposal with a phonetic explanation. I argue that * ‐s lenited and voiced to *‐ ɦ word‐finally which colours the preceding short vowel ă to * ɔ ( o after lengthening). Word‐internally, no debuccalisation occurs. Voiced dental fricative * z colours the preceding a ‐vowel to * ε ( e after lengthening). The voiced retroflex fricative * ẓ , on the contrary, is central enough to cause no colouring. Voiced... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kz653ds Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vn9c7q3 This project argues that latent space—the learned, multidimensional, representational substrate of neural networks—is not only a mathematical construct but, read through literature, a structure akin to architectural interiority that renders the abstract physically legible. We stage three case studies to trace deep homologies between biological and synthetic language: (1) speech-producing brains alongside speech-generating GANs, which learn by informative imitation and exhibit imagitation, which exceeds mere replication; (2) Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a cartography of latent space, where nonce words and associative syntax model pre-narrative interiority; and (3) FinneGANs, a GAN trained on Finnegans Wake audio, whose outputs probe the limits of comprehensibility and pre-speech form. Across these isomorphs, we contend that language is a final, linearizing layer over a generative, precategorial interior. Architecture serves as a navigable armature of the interior, where the symbolic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2vn9c7q3 Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Nina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gt4p8gx Understanding how deep convolutional neural networks classify data has been subject to extensive research. This paper proposes a technique to visualize and interpret intermediate layers of unsupervised deep convolutional networks by averaging over individual feature maps in each convolutional layer and inferring underlying distributions of words with non-linear regression techniques. A GAN-based architecture (ciwGAN [1]) that includes a Generator, a Discriminator, and a classifier was trained on unlabeled sliced lexical items from TIMIT. The training process results in a deep convolutional network that learns to classify words into discrete classes only from the requirement of the Generator to output informative data. This classifier network has no access to the training data – only to the generated data. We propose a technique to visualize individual convolutional layers in the classifier that yields highly informative time-series data for each convolutional layer and apply it... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2gt4p8gx Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper Zhou, Alan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wn4c215 The sperm whale communication system, consisting of groups of clicks called <i>codas</i>, has been primarily analyzed in terms of the number of clicks and their inter-click timing. This paper reports spectral properties in sperm whale vocalizations and demonstrates that spectral properties are highly structured, discretely distributed across codas, and uttered in dialogues, rather than being a physical artefact of whale movement. We report formant structure in whale codas and uncover previously unobserved spectral patterns. We argue that these spectral properties freely combine with the traditionally analyzed properties. We present a visualization technique that allows the description of several previously unobserved patterns. Codas are on many levels analogous to human vowels and diphthongs and can be conceptualized in terms of the source-filter theory: vowel duration and pitch correspond to the number of clicks and their timing (traditional coda types), while spectral properties... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1wn4c215 Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper Sprouse, Ronald L Leban, Andrej Silva, Miles Gero, Shane https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d20170k Karuk is an isolate language of northern California with a rich history of academic and locally-based documentation for over 100 years and an active community of learners, teachers, and speakers today. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the language’s history, social contexts, and grammatical patterns through present-day language use and language reclamation. After an introduction to the language’s sociocultural and linguistic setting, we offer a grammatical profile of this polysynthetic, highly agglutinating language, whose phonological patterns cause extensive fusion at morpheme boundaries. Among other features of typological interest, we discuss the Karuk pitch-accent system, its elaborate system of directional suffixes, multiple pluractional categories, the absence of a copula, and pragmatically determined word order. We conclude with a history of documentation and revitalization work in the Karuk community. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d20170k Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Garrett, Andrew Gehr, Susan Maier, Erik Hans Mikkelsen, Line Richardson, Crystal Sandy, Clare S https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9712b7k5 A history of modern linguistics: From the beginnings to World War II by James McElvenny (review) https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9712b7k5 Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Garrett, Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59w309k6 In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, Andrew Garrett examines Kroeber’s work in the early twentieth century and his legacy today, asking how a vigorous opponent of racism and advocate for Indigenous rights in his own era became a symbol of his ... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59w309k6 Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Garrett, Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xf6r5rd The Eastern Pomo Language https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7xf6r5rd Mon, 1 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 McLendon, Sally https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vc1z6w2 <p>Many scholars have argued that some instances of Ā movement include an interaction with some A feature, e.g., D (Aldridge 2004, 2008; Bossi and Diercks 2019; Coon, Baier,&nbsp;and Levin 2021; Branan and Erlewine 2024) or ϕ (van Urk 2015, Colley and Privoznov 2020).&nbsp;However, the interaction between the A and Ā features is not the same in every case. Assuming that Ā movement is predicated on an Agree relationship, I analyze two types of mixed A/Ā&nbsp;Agreement. In the first type, one probe searches for the A and Ā features conjunctively, such that both features must be found together. With novel fieldwork data, I illustrate that this pattern is found in Ndengeleko (Bantu). The conjunctive pattern is challenging to capture from&nbsp;a standard, two-probe perspective on mixed positions (following Chomsky 2001). Building on&nbsp;work on probes’ satisfaction conditions (Deal 2015, 2021), I show that the Ndengeleko pattern&nbsp;is best captured by a probe with a conjunctive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vc1z6w2 Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Scott, Tessa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4w34v92f Metrical stress and glottal stops in A’ingae: A study of cyclicity and&nbsp;dominance&nbsp;at the interface of phonology and morphology https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4w34v92f Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Dąbkowski, Maksymilian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56d1q8bh Abstract I argue for a semantic distinction between two classes of attitude complements. One class is best modeled in terms of possible worlds compatible with what the attitude holder believes/says, in the tradition of Hintikka. The other is best modeled in terms of centered worlds representing the de se perspective of the attitude holder, in the tradition of Chierchia (in turn inspired by Lewis). Much work has assumed that all attitude complements are to be treated semantically in this second manner. I refer to this hypothesis as Uniformity. Uniformity predicts that all attitude complements should be equally semantically able to host elements that must refer de se, such as shifted first person indexicals or relative tenses. Drawing on new evidence from Nez Perce, I demonstrate that this prediction is false, and argue that the best explanation for the distribution of dedicated de se elements comes from variation in whether attitude complements denote sets of centered tuples or... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56d1q8bh Wed, 5 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Deal, Amy Rose https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7114-4103 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gb3t5tm <p>This paper presents an analysis of the rather unusual tone system of the almost totally undocumented Thɔnkɔ /t̪ɔŋkɔ/ dialect of Limba, a Niger-Congo language of Sierra Leone (and slight overlap into Guinée). As we will show, most words are all low tone in their citation form, but exhibit a wide range of tonal contrasts with different high tones popping up when words occur in context. We will illustrate, step by step, how the observed facts justify the proposed contrastive underlying forms and reveal tonal alternations which are best treated with such abstract representations. To show the opaqueness of the widespread tonal neutralization within the system which results from Final High Lowering (FHL), we begin with the interaction of nouns and their adnominal modifiers and then turn to the verb phrase and the clause. We show that the L% boundary tone triggering FHL occurs at the end of declarative and imperative utterances as well as yes-no questions but, interestingly, not at... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gb3t5tm Wed, 3 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Hyman, Larry M. Kamara, Daniel Ibrahim https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44v21211 A Grammar of Nomlaki https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44v21211 Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Björklund, Anna https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r21f2fm Interactions between pronouns and clausal structure: Perspectives from Atchan https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5r21f2fm Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Jarvis, Rebecca E https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g9093t3 Abstract: Effects of word frequency on spoken word duration are well documented and have long informed theories of the mental lexicon. In this study, we discuss the two theoretical constructs, 'frequency' and 'word', that are implicated by the notion of lexical frequency, in light of recent models of the lexicon that do not contain stable, discrete lexical representations, and in which lexical frequency therefore has no place. We compare two approaches (localist spreading-activation vs. discriminative learning (DL) models integrating distributional semantics) by assessing regression models of spoken word duration of English homophones grounded in each. We further show that the relationship between a homophone's form and its semantics is predictive of its duration, consistent with predictions of the DL-based model. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g9093t3 Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Gahl, Susanne Baayen, R Harald https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qj8q1gh Laryngeal features and segmental length: Cases studies in Yánesha’, Barese, Maranese, and Italian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4qj8q1gh Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Robertson Molinaro, Allegra https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g76n758 <p>This paper is an opinionated survey of issues and perspectives in current models of Agree, understood as a single abstract grammatical operation common to all syntactic long-distance dependencies. I begin with a brief introduction to Chomsky's 2000, 2001 foundational work on Agree. I then review three strands of literature that have in notable ways chipped away at the conceptual foundations of that work in the course of improving the cross-linguistic empirical adequacy of the theory. These center on valuation and relativized probing, in section 3; defaults and failure to value, in section 4; and the question of whether goals must be made “active” by uninterpretable features, in section 5. In section 6, I review an ongoing debate about the directionality of Agree in light of the issues raised for uninterpretable features in sections 3-5. The paper concludes with a presentation of what I see as a way forward for the theory of Agree: the interaction/satisfaction theory, which... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g76n758 Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Deal, Amy Rose https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7114-4103 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0hk9n57m Preliminary Investigations into the Communicative Efficiency of Logographic Writing Systems and Written Languages https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0hk9n57m Mon, 2 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Hermalin, Noah M https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7243268r We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures, registers and styles, prosody, co-speech gestures, and other topics. Because the survivors represent a socially and geographically diverse cross-section of Yiddish-speaking society, their testimonies are an invaluable resource on the language as it was transmitted from generation to generation before the genocide of European Jewry. This article outlines the CSYE development workflow and highlights use cases for its materials in linguistic research and other domains. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7243268r Fri, 9 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Bleaman, IL https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0410-7369 Nove, CR https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5902-0802 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6h77r7t5 Variationist sociolinguistic methodology is grounded in the principle of accountability, which requires researchers to identify all of the contexts in which a given variable occurs or fails to occur. For morphosyntactic, lexical, and discourse variables, this process is notoriously time- and labor-intensive, as researchers manually sift through raw data in search of tokens to analyze. In this article, we demonstrate the usability of pretrained computational language models to automatically identify tokens of sociolinguistic variables in raw text. We focus on two English-language variables from different linguistic domains: intensifier choice (lexical; e.g., she is {very, really, so} smart) and complementizer selection (morphosyntactic; e.g., they thought {that, Ø} I understood). Text classifiers built with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) achieve high precision and recall metrics for both variables, even with relatively little hand-annotated training... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6h77r7t5 Fri, 9 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Bleaman, Isaac L https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0410-7369 Kommerell, Rhea https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rf275pb In many Mayan languages, combinations of subjects and objects are restricted by relative animacy hierarchy effects: subjects must be at least as high as objects in terms of animacy. Building empirically on a novel description of Chuj, as well as reported data for ten additional Mayan languages from across the family, we offer a new approach to these effects. Our analysis builds theoretically on recent work tracing person/animacy restrictions to the nature of featural representations and the operation Agree, bringing this literature together with current understandings of Mayan syntax and the high-/low-absolutive parameter. We argue that the cross-Mayan data—relative hierarchy effects holding in the same way across both high-absolutive and low-absolutive languages—are best handled by, and bring new support for, an interaction/satisfaction approach to Agree and hierarchy effects (Deal 2024). Our analysis also casts new light on key topics in Mayan syntax, including the proper analysis... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rf275pb Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Deal, Amy Rose https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7114-4103 Royer, Justin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1hg2k3hg A set of remembrances of Prof Emeritus Ian Maddieson, from the memorial gathering for him which was held on Feb 22, 2025. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1hg2k3hg Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Johnson, Keith https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0n0426qt Languages show ergativity when they treat transitive subjects distinctly from intransitive ones, treat objects like intransitive subjects, or treat unaccusative subjects unlike unergative and transitive subjects. Ergativity plays a central role in the study of case, agreement, and non-finite clauses. It casts light in addition on the constraints at play in A' extraction. Across these domains, the investigation of ergativity offers a rich arena of crosslinguistic variation against a backdrop of potential language universals. This chapter surveys both the major proposed universals of ergativity and the variety of theoretical approaches which have been applied to them. A central theme is that ergativity is not one but many phenomena. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0n0426qt Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Deal, Amy Rose https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7114-4103 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bq8f1nt Claims about lexical elaboration (e.g. Mongolian has many horse-related terms) are widespread in the scholarly and popular literature. Here, we show that computational analyses of bilingual dictionaries can be used to test claims about lexical elaboration at scale. We validate our approach by introducing BILA, a dataset including 1,574 bilingual dictionaries, and showing that it confirms 147 out of 163 previous claims from the literature. We then identify previously unreported examples of lexical elaboration, and analyze how lexical elaboration is influenced by ecological and cultural variables. Claims about lexical elaboration are sometimes dismissed as either obvious or fanciful, but our work suggests that large-scale computational approaches to the topic can produce nonobvious and well-grounded insights into language and culture. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bq8f1nt Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Khishigsuren, Temuulen Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 Vylomova, Ekaterina Kemp, Charles https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4558f24g [This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1155895.]. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4558f24g Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Gahl, Susanne https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rk8k2fc The Person-Case Constraint (PCC) is a family of restrictions on the relative person of the two objects of a ditransitive. PCC effects offer a testing ground for theories of Agree and of syntactic features, both those on nominals and those found on agreement probes. This article offers a new theory of PCC effects in an interaction/satisfaction theory of Agree (Deal 2015a) and shows the advantages of this framework in capturing PCC typology. On this model, probes are specified for interaction, determining which features will be copied to them, and for satisfaction, determining which features will cause probing to stop. Applied to the PCC, this theory (a) captures all four types of PCC effect recognized by Nevins (2007) under a unified notion of Agree; (b) captures the restriction of PCC effects to contexts of “Double Weakness” in many prominent examples (e.g., in Italian, Greek, and Basque, where PCC effects hold only when both objects are expressed with clitics); (c) naturally... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rk8k2fc Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Deal, Amy Rose https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7114-4103 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qg5q6q9 Abstract: Some natural languages do not lexically distinguish between modals of possibility and modals of necessity. From the perspective of languages like English, modals in such languages appear to do double duty: they are used both where possibility modals are expected and where necessity modals are expected. The Nez Perce modal suffix o'qa offers an example of this behavior. I offer a simple account of the flexibility of the o'qa modal centered on the absence of scalar implicatures. O'qa is a possibility modal that does not belong to a Horn scale; its use is never associated with a scalar implicature. Accordingly, in an upward-entailing environment, φ- o'qa is appropriate whenever there are accessible φ-worlds, even if indeed ALL accessible worlds are φ-worlds. In a downward-entailing environment, the flexibility of the o'qa modal is seen no more. Here, neither o'qa nor English possibility modals are associated with scalar implicatures, and the use of o'qa exactly parallels... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qg5q6q9 Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Deal, Amy Rose https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7114-4103 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6r1029sf Ergative and accusative behave as dependent cases insofar as their appearance on a nominal depends on the presence of another nominal in the same domain. Recent work has taken the phenomenon of case dependency to challenge the idea that case is assigned via Agree. Focusing on Shawi (Kawapanan; Peru), we show not only that case dependency can be captured via Agree, but also that doing so opens up a new way of understanding the typology of global case splits. Ergative in Shawi appears when the subject is at least as high as the object on the person hierarchy—a global split—and can be accompanied by explicit realization of the object’s features on the subject (“object agreement on the subject”). We propose that ergative arises in Shawi when a probe on v Agrees with both the object and the subject, transferring object features to the subject; these features are spelled out as ergative case and as object agreement. In general, we show that dependent cases, both ergative and accusative,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6r1029sf Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Clem, Emily Deal, Amy Rose https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b44s8d0 Locality in allomorphy and presyntactic bundling: A case of tense and aspect https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b44s8d0 Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Deal, Amy Rose https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gc1h05v Theories of allomorph selection differ in the extent to which they allow the realization of morphemes closer to the Root to be sensitive to the shape of more peripheral morphemes. In contrast to the full parallelism of classic Optimality Theory (OT), various current approaches posit that morphemes are realized one at a time (serially), beginning with the Root and proceeding outwards. This predicts that no phonologically conditioned outward-sensitive allomorphy should exist. In this chapter we discuss new evidence from Nez Perce that morpheme realization is partly, though in fact not purely, inside-out serial. Cyclic domains are spelled out one at a time, proceeding from inner domains outward; within a domain, morphemes may be realized in a non-inside-out fashion (in parallel, or outside-in). We show how the Nez Perce facts can be accommodated both in a version of Distributed Morphology (which we call “DM with Insertion by Phase”) and in Stratal OT. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gc1h05v Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Deal, AR https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7114-4103 Wolf, M https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0f2048fx The morphosyntax of verbal agreement in Uab Meto https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0f2048fx Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Lemon, Tyler J B https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94z817df Many languages contain nouns that seem to have different genders in the singular and in the plural. In this paper, we investigate two languages with this kind of “ambigeneric” noun: Romanian (Romance; Romania) and Guébie (Kru; Côte d’Ivoire). Romanian is well-known for its ambigeneric nouns, traditionally referred to as neuter, but ambigeneric nouns in Guébie have not been previously studied. While Guébie is unrelated to Romanian, and its gender system is based on different features, the ambigeneric nouns in the two languages are strikingly similar. Building on the analysis of Romanian in Kramer 2015a, b, we argue for a unified Distributed Morphology analysis of ambigeneric nouns in Romanian and Guébie. Specifically, we claim that (i) ambigeneric nouns lack gender features, and (ii) the ambigeneric pattern is generated through a handful of Impoverishment operations. We show how alternative approaches to ambigeneric nouns face empirical and conceptual challenges in accounting for... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94z817df Wed, 4 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Kramer, R Sande, H https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1335-8717 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7nc8k1r6 Abstract: It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and a model of cultural evolution that combines iterated learning and communication. We show that this model, instantiated in neural networks, converges to color naming systems that are efficient in the IB sense and similar to human color naming systems. We also show that some other proposals such as iterated learning alone, communication alone, or the greater learnability of convex categories, do not yield the same outcome as clearly. We conclude that the combination of iterated learning and communication provides a plausible means by which human semantic systems become efficient. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7nc8k1r6 Wed, 4 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Carlsson, Emil Dubhashi, Devdatt Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xf811w0 Onomatopoeia in Guebie (Kru) https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4xf811w0 Wed, 4 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Sande, Hannah https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1335-8717 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2bz377s5 Distinctive aspects of a culture are often reflected in the meaning and usage of words in the language spoken by bearers of that culture. Keywords such as душа (soul) in Russian, hati (heart) in Indonesian and Malay, and gezellig (convivial/cosy/fun) in Dutch are held to be especially culturally revealing, and scholars have identified a number of such keywords using careful linguistic analyses (Peeters, 2020b; Wierzbicka, 1990). Because keywords are expected to have different statistical properties than related words in other languages, we argue that a quantitative comparison of word usage across languages can help to identify cultural keywords. To support this claim, we describe a computational method that compares word frequencies across languages, and apply it to both linguistic corpora and word association data. The method identifies culturally specific words that range from "obvious" examples, such as Amsterdam in Dutch, to non-obvious yet independently proposed examples,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2bz377s5 Wed, 4 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Lim, Zheng Wei Stuart, Harry De Deyne, Simon Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 Vylomova, Ekaterina Cohn, Trevor Kemp, Charles https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0r21r765 This document assembles five notebooks and one folder of loose notes that were created by Alfred Kroeber (and Franz Boas) and deposited after Kroeber’s death in The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0r21r765 Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Kroeber, Alfred https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59n586kh Abstract: A'ingae (or Cofán, ISO 639‐3: con) is an indigenous language isolate spoken in northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia. This paper presents the first comprehensive overview of the A'ingae phonology, including descriptions of (i) the language's phonemic inventory, (ii) phonotactics and a number of related phonological rules, (iii) nasality and nasal spreading, as well as (iv) stress, glottalisation, their morphophonology, and aspects of clause‐level prosody. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/59n586kh Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Dąbkowski, Maksymilian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hs763zv Abstract: We describe and analyze the semantics of rationale and precautioning clauses (i.e. in order to- and lest-clauses) through a detailed case study of two operators in A’ingae (or Cofán, iso 639-3: con, an Amazonian isolate): the infinitive -ye ‘inf’ and the apprehensional -sa’ne ‘appr.’ We provide a new account of rationale semantics and the first formal account of precautioning semantics. We propose that in structures such as [$p$ [(in order) to$q$]] or [$p$ [$q$-ye]], the rationale operator (underlined) encodes modal semantics where the goal worlds of the actor responsible for $p$ achieve $q$. In structures such as [$p$ [lest$q$]] or [$p$ [$q$-sa’ne]], the precautioning operator encodes modal semantics where the actor’s goal worlds avoid a recoverable situation $r$ which entails $q$ ($r\Rightarrow q$). We observe and account for three apparent asymmetries within the domain of rationale and precautioning... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3hs763zv Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Dąbkowski, Maksymilian AnderBois, Scott https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12q9k57p Abstract: The intervocalic position favors voicing in stops. Yet, some languages have been reported to feature the opposite (unnatural) process of intervocalic devoicing. This paper investigates two such case studies. Pre-Berawan intervocalic *b and *g have developed into Berawan k. Pre-Kiput intervocalic *g, *ɟʝ, and *v have developed into Kiput k, cç, and f, respectively. To account for the data, we invoke Beguš’s (2018, 2019) blurring process model of sound change. The model proposes that unnatural phonology derives from a sequence of at least three phonetically motivated sound changes. We argue that the steps involved in intervocalic devoicing are (i) the intervocalic fricativization of voiced stops, (ii) devoicing of fricatives, and (iii) the occlusion of devoiced fricatives. Each of the steps is independently attested and motivated. We demonstrate that our blurring process proposal explains aspects of the historical development unaccounted for by previous approaches,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/12q9k57p Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper Dąbkowski, Maksymilian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/643497v5 Remembering Anna Morpurgo Davies https://escholarship.org/uc/item/643497v5 Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Garrett, Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bg6045z New Perspectives on Indo-European Phylogeny and Chronology https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bg6045z Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Garrett, A https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2054p08f As standards for vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy have become more stringent, concerns have arisen that the incorporation of fuel-saving technologies may entail tradeoffs with other vehicle attributes important to consumers such as acceleration performance. Assessing the effects of these tradeoffs on consumer welfare requires estimates of both the degree of the tradeoffs, and consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for the foregone benefits. This paper has two objectives. The first is to review recent literature that presents, or can be used to calculate, marginal WTP (MWTP) for vehicle attributes to describe the attributes that have been studied and the estimated MWTP values. We found 52 U.S.-focused papers with sufficient data to calculate WTP values for 142 different vehicle attributes, which we organized into 15 general groups of comfort, fuel availability, fuel costs, fuel type, incentives, model availability, non-fuel operating costs, performance, pollution, prestige,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2054p08f Mon, 9 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Greene, David Hossain, Anushah Hofmann, Julia Helfand, Gloria Beach, Robert https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2pr6n0k9 Realization and Representation of Nepali Laryngeal Contrasts https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2pr6n0k9 Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Schwarz, Martha R https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66k027ps The RUKI-Rule in the Rigveda https://escholarship.org/uc/item/66k027ps Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Begus, Gasper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33q8m7ws This paper argues that training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on local and non-local dependencies in speech data offers insights into how deep neural networks discretize continuous data and how symbolic-like rule-based morphophonological processes emerge in a deep convolutional architecture. Acquisition of speech has recently been modeled as a dependency between latent space and data generated by GANs in Beguš (2020b), who models learning of a simple local allophonic distribution. We extend this approach to test learning of local and non-local phonological processes that include approximations of morphological processes. We further parallel outputs of the model to results of a behavioral experiment where human subjects are trained on the data used for training the GAN network. Four main conclusions emerge: (i) the networks provide useful information for computational models of speech acquisition even if trained on a comparatively small dataset of an artificial grammar... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33q8m7ws Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f6210p6 Training deep neural networks on well-understood dependencies in speech data can provide new insights into how they learn internal representations. This paper argues that acquisition of speech can be modeled as a dependency between random space and generated speech data in the Generative Adversarial Network architecture and proposes a methodology to uncover the network's internal representations that correspond to phonetic and phonological properties. The Generative Adversarial architecture is uniquely appropriate for modeling phonetic and phonological learning because the network is trained on unannotated raw acoustic data and learning is unsupervised without any language-specific assumptions or pre-assumed levels of abstraction. A Generative Adversarial Network was trained on an allophonic distribution in English, in which voiceless stops surface as aspirated word-initially before stressed vowels, except if preceded by a sibilant [s]. The network successfully learns the allophonic... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5f6210p6 Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pm6b2nd Comparing artificial neural networks with outputs of neuroimaging techniques has recently seen substantial advances in (computer) vision and text-based language models. Here, we propose a framework to compare biological and artificial neural computations of spoken language representations and propose several new challenges to this paradigm. The proposed technique is based on a similar principle that underlies electroencephalography (EEG): averaging of neural (artificial or biological) activity across neurons in the time domain, and allows to compare encoding of any acoustic property in the brain and in intermediate convolutional layers of an artificial neural network. Our approach allows a direct comparison of responses to a phonetic property in the brain and in deep neural networks that requires no linear transformations between the signals. We argue that the brain stem response (cABR) and the response in intermediate convolutional layers to the exact same stimulus are highly... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pm6b2nd Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Beguš, Gašper Zhou, Alan Zhao, T Christina https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1f1727wf Machine learning has been advancing dramatically over the past decade. Most strides are human-based applications due to the availability of large-scale datasets; however, opportunities are ripe to apply this technology to more deeply understand non-human communication. We detail a scientific roadmap for advancing the understanding of communication of whales that can be built further upon as a template to decipher other forms of animal and non-human communication. Sperm whales, with their highly developed neuroanatomical features, cognitive abilities, social structures, and discrete click-based encoding make for an excellent model for advanced tools that can be applied to other animals in the future. We outline the key elements required for the collection and processing of massive datasets, detecting basic communication units and language-like higher-level structures, and validating models through interactive playback experiments. The technological capabilities developed by such... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1f1727wf Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Andreas, Jacob Beguš, Gašper Bronstein, Michael M Diamant, Roee Delaney, Denley Gero, Shane Goldwasser, Shafi Gruber, David F de Haas, Sarah Malkin, Peter Pavlov, Nikolay Payne, Roger Petri, Giovanni Rus, Daniela Sharma, Pratyusha Tchernov, Dan Tønnesen, Pernille Torralba, Antonio Vogt, Daniel Wood, Robert J https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7n3020c1 Topics on the syntax of Kawahíva: A Tupí-Guaraní language from the Brazilian Amazon https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7n3020c1 Fri, 9 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000 dos Santos, Wesley N https://escholarship.org/uc/item/37s1x1sg Acoustic Measurement in Phonetics: Current practices and future directions https://escholarship.org/uc/item/37s1x1sg Fri, 24 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Grabowski, Emily J https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2df1m156 We investigate the impact of medium of communication (in-person versus video) on intraspeaker variation in conversation - a process we refer to as medium-shifting. To quantify the effects of medium-shifting and understand its possible motivations, we analyze three variables that show intraspeaker effects of clear or careful speech: articulation rate, density-controlled vowel space area, and (ING). The data come from matched in-person and video-mediated interviews with thirty-three repeat guests from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, recorded before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixed-effects regression models show that compared to in-person interviews, video-mediated interviews involve a significantly lower articulation rate and larger vowel space, but no significant difference in (ING). The results suggest that speakers may engage in medium-shifting in order to enhance their intelligibility over video, for example, through more precise articulatory movements and greater... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2df1m156 Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Bleaman, Isaac L https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0410-7369 Cugno, Katie Helms, Annie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9291n0tv Modeling the Role of Social Information in Speech Perception https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9291n0tv Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Remirez, Emily A https://escholarship.org/uc/item/456645xj Speech produced by children is characterized by a high fundamental frequency which complicates measurement of vocal tract resonances, and hence coarticulation. Here two whole-spectrum measures of coarticulation are validated, one temporal and one spectral, that are less sensitive to these challenges. Using these measures, consonant-vowel coarticulation is calculated in the speech of a large sample of 4-year-old children. The measurements replicate known lingual coarticulatory findings from the literature, demonstrating the utility of these acoustic measures of coarticulation in speakers of all ages. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/456645xj Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Cychosz, Margaret https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3021-4707 Edwards, Jan R Munson, Benjamin Johnson, Keith https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xv905sb Clause structure and ergativity in Nukuoro https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xv905sb Tue, 19 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Drummond, Emily N https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72n397s2 This paper identifies time calibration points for accurately rooting and dating the phylogeny of Arawakan, the largest Indigenous linguistic family of the Americas. We present and model a methodology for extracting calibration points from the archaeological record, based on principles of geographical overlap between archaeological sites and Arawakan peoples, and on continuity in material culture between archaeological finds and modern Arawakan practices. Based on a consensus model of the expansion of the Arawakan family from Central Amazonia, we focus on archaeological finds in Arawakan expansion zones, where Arawakan material culture abruptly appears in a given region, and where only a single major Arawakan subgroup/clade is present. We find 12 calibration points from archaeological sites in Arawakan expansion zones and also identify more recent calibration points from the historical record based on first mentions of ethnonyms and early sources of lexical data. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/72n397s2 Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Michael, Lev https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9612-5996 de Carvalho, Fernando Chacon, Thiago Rybka, Konrad Sabogal, Andrés Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia Kaiping, Gereon https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38b500v9 Abstract: This paper describes and analyzes phonological processes pertinent to the glottal stop in A’ingae (or Cofán, iso 639-3: ). The operations which the glottal stops undergo and trigger reveal an interaction of two morphophonological parameters: stratum and stress dominance. First, verbal suffixes are organized in two morphophonological domains, or strata. Within the inner domain, glottal stops affect stress placement, which I analyze as an interaction with foot structure. In the outer domain, glottal stops do not have any effects on stress. Second, some verbal suffixes delete stress (i. e. they are dominant). Dominance is unpredictable and independent of the suffix’s morphophonological domain, but dominance and the phonological domain interact in a non-trivial way: only inner dominant suffixes delete glottalization. To account for the A’ingae data, I adopt Cophonologies by Phase (Sande et&nbsp;al. 2020), which (i) models phonological stratification while (ii) allowing... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38b500v9 Wed, 25 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Dąbkowski, Maksymilian https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44x8n0s3 During speech perception, linguistic elements such as consonants and vowels are extracted from a complex acoustic speech signal. The superior temporal gyrus (STG) participates in high-order auditory processing of speech, but how it encodes phonetic information is poorly understood. We used high-density direct cortical surface recordings in humans while they listened to natural, continuous speech to reveal the STG representation of the entire English phonetic inventory. At single electrodes, we found response selectivity to distinct phonetic features. Encoding of acoustic properties was mediated by a distributed population response. Phonetic features could be directly related to tuning for spectrotemporal acoustic cues, some of which were encoded in a nonlinear fashion or by integration of multiple cues. These findings demonstrate the acoustic-phonetic representation of speech in human STG. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44x8n0s3 Sat, 9 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Mesgarani, Nima Cheung, Connie Johnson, Keith Chang, Edward F https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xr5m502 Introduction: Bilingualism has historically been claimed to be a risk factor for developmental stuttering. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011) ostensibly contains evidence to test that claim. Methods: We analyze data from monolingual and bilingual children in Kindergarten through fifth grade in the ECLS-K:2011. Results and discussion: The prevalence, male/female ratio, and onset and recovery of reported stuttering in the ECLS are inconsistent with widely-accepted clinical reports of stuttering. We argue that the reported figures may be misleading. We discuss some factors that may inflate the reported prevalence, including a lack of awareness of the difference between stuttering vs. normal disfluencies, and the informal usage of the word "stuttering" on the part of teachers and parents to describe typical disfluencies. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xr5m502 Tue, 5 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Gahl, Susanne https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97v3h6x0 Studies in Crow Linguistics: Documentation, Grammar, and History https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97v3h6x0 Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Ko, Edwin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gt4077b Epistemic modality across syntactic catergories in Kipsigis https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gt4077b Mon, 7 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Bossi, Madeline C https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4d02h96s This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine 10-month-old infants were tested. The task elicited mixed preferences: familiarity (longer average looks to the words likely to be familiar to the infants), novelty (longer average looks to the words likely to be unfamiliar) and no-preference (similar-length of looks to both type of words). The infants who exhibited either a familiarity or a novelty response were more advanced on independent indices of phonetic advance than the infants who showed no preference. In addition, infants exhibiting novelty responses were more lexically advanced than either the infants who exhibited familiarity or those who showed... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4d02h96s Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 DePaolis, Rory A Keren-Portnoy, Tamar Vihman, Marilyn https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-4840 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zx351pm Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word forms have lengths that enable efficient production, and work on the semantic typology of the lexicon suggests that word meanings represent efficient partitions of semantic space. Here we establish a theoretical link between these two lines of work and present an information-theoretic analysis that captures how communicative pressures influence both form and meaning. We apply our approach to the grammatical features of number, tense, and evidentiality and show that the approach explains both which systems of feature values are attested across languages and the relative lengths of the forms for those feature values. Our approach shows that general information-theoretic principles can capture variation in both form and meaning across languages. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zx351pm Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Mollica, Francis Bacon, Geoff Zaslavsky, Noga Xu, Yang Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 Kemp, Charles https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5b62q00c Hue-scaling functions are designed to characterize color appearance by assessing the relative strength of the red versus green and blue versus yellow opponent sensations comprising different hues. However, these judgments can be non-intuitive and may pose difficulties for measurement and analysis. We explored an alternative scaling method based on positioning a dial to represent the relative similarity or distance of each hue from the labeled positions for the opponent categories. The hue-scaling and hue-similarity rating methods were compared for 28 observers. Settings on both tasks were comparable though the similarity ratings showed less inter-observer variability and weaker categorical bias, suggesting that these categorical biases may reflect properties of the task rather than the percepts. Alternatively, properties that are concordant for the two paradigms provide evidence for characteristics that do reflect color appearance. Individual differences on both tasks suggest... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5b62q00c Thu, 8 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Matera, Courtney N Emery, Kara J Volbrecht, Vicki J Vemuri, Kavita Kay, Paul Webster, Michael A https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wr156qk An order effect in English infants’ discrimination of an Urdu affricate contrast https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wr156qk Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Dar, Mariam Keren-Portnoy, Tamar Vihman, Marilyn https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-4840 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gf3c34v We derive a principled information-theoretic account of cross-language semantic variation. Specifically, we argue that languages efficiently compress ideas into words by optimizing the information bottleneck (IB) trade-off between the complexity and accuracy of the lexicon. We test this proposal in the domain of color naming and show that (<i>i</i>) color-naming systems across languages achieve near-optimal compression; (<i>ii</i>) small changes in a single trade-off parameter account to a large extent for observed cross-language variation; (<i>iii</i>) efficient IB color-naming systems exhibit soft rather than hard category boundaries and often leave large regions of color space inconsistently named, both of which phenomena are found empirically; and (<i>iv</i>) these IB systems evolve through a sequence of structural phase transitions, in a single process that captures key ideas associated with different accounts of color category evolution. These results suggest that a drive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gf3c34v Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Zaslavsky, Noga Kemp, Charles Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 Tishby, Naftali https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vw0v4x5 Pronouns and agreement in San Juan Atitán Mam https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9vw0v4x5 Fri, 19 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Scott, Tessa https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gx5f6v0 When speaking, we dynamically coordinate movements of our jaw, tongue, lips, and larynx. To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying articulation, we used direct cortical recordings from human sensorimotor cortex while participants spoke natural sentences that included sounds spanning the entire English phonetic inventory. We used deep neural networks to infer speakers' articulator movements from produced speech acoustics. Individual electrodes encoded a diversity of articulatory kinematic trajectories (AKTs), each revealing coordinated articulator movements toward specific vocal tract shapes. AKTs captured a wide range of movement types, yet they could be differentiated by the place of vocal tract constriction. Additionally, AKTs manifested out-and-back trajectories with harmonic oscillator dynamics. While AKTs were functionally stereotyped across different sentences, context-dependent encoding of preceding and following movements during production of the same phoneme demonstrated... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0gx5f6v0 Fri, 19 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Chartier, Josh Anumanchipalli, Gopala K https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9714-7740 Johnson, Keith Chang, Edward F https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mm7x42d Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mm7x42d Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 Kemp, Charles Kay, Paul https://escholarship.org/uc/item/57x8z2cn Sunlight exposure cannot explain “grue” languages https://escholarship.org/uc/item/57x8z2cn Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Hardy, Joseph L Werner, John S https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9622-7493 Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 Kay, Paul Frederick, Christina M https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tw564ck Abstract: It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This hypothesis has so far been supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language comparison, rather than directly by diachronic data. Here, we directly test this hypothesis in the domain of color naming, by analyzing recent diachronic data from Nafaanra, a language of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and comparing it with quantitative predictions derived from the mathematical theory of efficient data compression. We show that color naming in Nafaanra has changed over the past four decades while remaining near-optimally efficient, and that this outcome would be unlikely under a random drift process that maintains structured color categories without pressure for efficiency. To our knowledge, this finding provides the first direct evidence that color naming evolves under pressure for efficiency, supporting the hypothesis that efficiency shapes the evolution of the lexicon. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tw564ck Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Zaslavsky, Noga Garvin, Karee Kemp, Charles Tishby, Naftali Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5h04r90z Focal colors, or best examples of color terms, have traditionally been viewed as either the underlying source of cross-language color-naming universals or derived from category boundaries that vary widely across languages. Existing data partially support and partially challenge each of these views. Here, we advance a position that synthesizes aspects of these two traditionally opposed positions and accounts for existing data. We do so by linking this debate to more general principles. We show that best examples of named color categories across 112 languages are well-predicted from category extensions by a statistical model of how representative a sample is of a distribution, independently shown to account for patterns of human inference. This model accounts for both universal tendencies and variation in focal colors across languages. We conclude that categorization in the contested semantic domain of color may be governed by principles that apply more broadly in cognition and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5h04r90z Fri, 5 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Abbott, Joshua T Griffiths, Thomas L Regier, Terry https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0808-5208 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cn8p5q8 The average of a color distribution has special significance for color coding (e.g., to estimate the illuminant) but how it depends on the visual representation (e.g., perceptual versus cone-opponent) or nonlinearities (e.g., categorical coding) is unknown. We measured the perceived average of two colors shown alternated in spatial arrays. Observers adjusted the components until the average equaled a specified reference hue. Matches for red, blue-red, or yellow-green were consistent with the arithmetic mean chromaticity, while blue-green settings deviated toward blue. The settings show little evidence for categorical coding, and cannot be predicted from the scaled appearances of the individual components. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cn8p5q8 Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Webster, Jacquelyn Kay, Paul Webster, Michael A https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kd7n73h Neural representations of words are thought to have a complex spatio-temporal cortical basis. It has been suggested that spoken word recognition is not a process of feed-forward computations from phonetic to lexical forms, but rather involves the online integration of bottom-up input with stored lexical knowledge. Using direct neural recordings from the temporal lobe, we examined cortical responses to words and pseudowords. We found that neural populations were not only sensitive to lexical status (real vs. pseudo), but also to cohort size (number of words matching the phonetic input at each time point) and cohort frequency (lexical frequency of those words). These lexical variables modulated neural activity from the posterior to anterior temporal lobe, and also dynamically as the stimuli unfolded on a millisecond time scale. Our findings indicate that word recognition is not purely modular, but relies on rapid and online integration of multiple sources of lexical knowledge. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kd7n73h Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Cibelli, Emily S Leonard, Matthew K Johnson, Keith Chang, Edward F https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2k7394tn Online Dictionaries for Language Revitalization https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2k7394tn Sat, 1 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Garrett, Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13f5s1xz “The Correct Way of Writing the Indian Language”: Juan Dolores at the University of California https://escholarship.org/uc/item/13f5s1xz Sat, 1 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 GARRETT, Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67c1f3vz This study aims to elucidate the factors that affect the robustness of word form representations by exploring the relative influence of lexical stress and segmental identity (consonant vs. vowel) on infant word recognition. Our main question was which changes to the words may go unnoticed and which may lead the words to be unrecognizable. One-hundred 11-month-old Hebrew-learning infants were tested in two experiments using the Central Fixation Procedure. In Experiment 1, 20 infants were presented with iambic Familiar and Unfamiliar words. The infants listened longer to Familiar than to Unfamiliar words, indicating their recognition of frequently heard word forms. In Experiment 2, four groups of 20 infants each were tested in each of four conditions involving altered iambic Familiar words contrasted with iambic Unfamiliar nonwords. In each condition, one segment in the Familiar word was changed-either a consonant or a vowel, in either the first (unstressed) or the second (stressed)... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67c1f3vz Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Segal, Osnat Keren‐Portnoy, Tamar Vihman, Marilyn https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-4840 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5n9887js Assessing scholarship in documentary linguistics https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5n9887js Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Garrett, Andrew Harris, Alice C https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4f4021hj Using a picture-auditory word recognition task, we examined how early child bilinguals access their languages and how the languages affect one another. Accuracy and response times in "false friends" (i.e., words with similar form but unrelated meanings) and semantically related words were compared with control conditions within and across languages and grades. Study 1 tested the performance of school-age children with balanced versus unbalanced knowledge of first-language (L1) Italian and second-language (L2) German. Study 2 compared unbalanced bilingual children with L1 Italian and L2 French or German to investigate the effect of lexical similarity in the children's languages. Children were found to activate both languages on receiving an auditory stimulus; performance in each language was affected by proficiency in the other language, degree of between-language similarity, and length of experience with each language. The BLINCS (Bilingual Language Interactive Network for Comprehension... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4f4021hj Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Persici, Valentina Vihman, Marilyn https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-4840 Burro, Roberto Majorano, Marinella https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34p981wq Phonological development is sometimes seen as a process of learning sounds, or forming phonological categories, and then combining sounds to build words, with the evidence taken largely from studies demonstrating 'perceptual narrowing' in infant speech perception over the first year of life. In contrast, studies of early word production have long provided evidence that holistic word learning may precede the formation of phonological categories. In that account, children begin by matching their existing vocal patterns to adult words, with knowledge of the phonological system emerging from the network of related word forms. Here I review evidence from production and then consider how the implicit and explicit learning mechanisms assumed by the complementary memory systems model might be understood as reconciling the two approaches. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34p981wq Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 Vihman, Marilyn M https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-4840