© 2014, © 2014 Association for the Study of Nationalities. This article develops a linguistic injustice test. Language policy measures passing the test conflict with the normative ideal of equal language recognition. The first part of the test checks for external restrictions – language policies that grant more recognition to one language group than to another. The second part of the test checks for internal restrictions – language policies that grant more recognition to some members of a language group (...) than to other members of the same group. The article then applies the linguistic injustice test to two models of linguistic justice: linguistic territoriality and linguistic pluralism. It is argued that real-life cases of linguistic territoriality tend to pass the test. It is argued that instantiations of linguistic pluralism tend to fail the test. (shrink)

Through a number of illuminating cases studies which draw in large part on the largely under-utilized data of Romance dialectal varieties, the present article sets out to highlight the importance that Romance data, especially those of non-standard varietites, can play in testing and enriching currents theories of syntax. In particular, we shall show that dialectal varieties, although frequently overlooked in the past, offer an immensely fertile and still relatively unexplored experimental territory in which to profitably investigate new ideas about language (...) structure, change and variation. At the same time, we champion the mutual benefits for theoretical linguists and Romanists of adopting a more integrated and reciprocally-informed approach in their respective treatments of linguistic evidence, highlighting how a familiarity with the key tools and ideas established in both fields has the potential to enrich linguistic and empirical analyses considerably. (shrink)

Both the music and social bonding hypothesis and the music as a credible signal hypothesis emerge as solid views of how human music and human musicality might have evolved. Nonetheless, both views could be improved with the consideration of the way in which human language might have evolved under the effects of our self-domestication.

Linguistic justice is about institutions distributing material and symbolic resources fairly when they are faced with linguistic diversity. However, no theory of linguistic justice has developed a systematic and comprehensive account of the moral dilemmas that take place in interpersonal linguistic relationships, in particular the power dynamics leading to (linguistic) domination. The aim of this article is to start building a general theory of linguistic domination, one that offers new conceptual tools for both empirical (...) and normative analyses of linguistically diverse societies. Using the republican tradition of thought, I argue that there is linguistic domination whenever someone is subject to the uncontrolled capacity for interference over their linguistic uses, ideology and acquisition by another agent. This article tests under what conditions this phenomenon takes place and the parties involved in it (both in terms of individuals and political institutions). (shrink)

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also (...) faced problems, which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided. (shrink)

Cross-linguistic comparisons serve as empirical tests generating evidence for and against lexical ambiguity in words like “good”, “know”, “the”, “can”, and “may”. Critics question such comparisons' validity. This article examines how cross-linguistic comparisons are treated as tests and shows that they have two predominant forms: one modeled on modus tollens, and another on Bayes' theorem, where the former is an enthymematic version of the latter. This analysis reveals the strengths and weaknesses of cross-linguistic comparisons, and (...) thereby guides interpretation of their results. It concludes that cross-linguistic comparisons generally yield stronger evidence against lexical ambiguity than for it. (shrink)

A family of familiar linguistic tests purport to help identify when a term is ambiguous. These tests are philosophically important: a familiar philosophical strategy is to claim that some phenomenon is disunified and its accompanying term is ambiguous. The tests have been used to evaluate disunification proposals about causation, pain, and knowledge, among others. -/- These ambiguity tests, however, have come under fire. It has been alleged that the tests fail for polysemy, a common (...) type of ambiguity, and one that is at issue in philosophically interesting cases. Furthermore, the objection that the tests fail for polysemy is often taken to be an undeniable bit of linguistic data. -/- We argue that this is mistaken. The objection implicitly relies on controversial assumptions about how to account for copredicational sentences, in which a single argument is ascribed prima facie incompatible properties. Furthermore, on several viable theories of copredication, the objection fails. However, our discussion also reveals that even if ambiguity tests are preserved, they may be significantly harder to execute than previously thought. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 479-491.

Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypotheses? Michael Devitt ( [2006a] , [2006b] ) argues, on the basis of a hypothesis concerning the psychology of such judgments, that linguists themselves are. We present empirical evidence suggesting that the relevant divide is not between linguists and non-linguists, but between subjects with and without minimally sufficient task-specific knowledge. In particular, we show that subjects with at least some minimal exposure to or knowledge of such tasks tend (...) to perform consistently with one another—greater knowledge of linguistics makes no further difference—while at the same time exhibiting markedly greater in-group consistency than those who have no previous exposure to or knowledge of such tasks and their goals. (shrink)

It is generally accepted among philosophers of science that hypothesis testing is a key methodological feature of science. As far as philosophical theories of confirmation are con...

It has been alleged that Carolus Linnaeus practised Eurocentrism, sexism and racism in naming plant genera after famous botanists, and excluding ‘barbarous names’. He has therefore been said to practise ‘linguistic imperialism’. This paper examines whether Linnaeus applied ‘linguistic imperialism’ to the naming of Chinese plants. On the basis of examples such as Thea (¼Camellia), Urena, Basella, Annona, Sapindus (¼Koelreuteria), and Panax, I conclude that Linnaeus used generic names of diverse origins. However, he misidentified Chinese plants’ habitats, and (...) acted on these misapprehensions. (shrink)

Recent experimental work on “natural” kind terms has shown evidence of both descriptive and nondescriptive reference determination. This has led some to propose ambiguity or hybrid theories, as opposed to traditional description and causal‐historical theories of reference. Many of those experiments tested theories against referential intuitions. We reject this method, urging that reference should be tested against usage, preferably by elicited production. Our tests of the usage of a biological kind term confirm that there are indeed both descriptive and (...) causal‐historical elements to the reference determination of some natural kind terms. We argue that to accommodate our results and earlier ones, we should abandon the common assumption that any one theory of reference fits all natural kind terms. Rather, it is likely that some terms are descriptive, some causal‐historical, some ambiguous, and some hybrid. This substantive conclusion is accompanied by a methodological one. Our experiments, like some earlier ones, found participants contradicting both each other and themselves. We argue that these contradictions indicate a lack of linguistic competence with the term. We conclude that these experiments have been faulty, because they test terms that are novel to participants and/or use fantastical vignettes. We provide some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

The central aims of this paper are to show how linguistic corpora have been used and can be used in philosophy and to argue that linguistic corpora and corpus analysis should be added to the philosopher’s toolkit of ways to address philosophical questions. A linguistic corpus is a curated collection of texts representing language use that can be queried to answer research questions. Among many other uses, linguistic corpora can help answer questions about the meaning of (...) words and the structure of discourse. Through a discussion of examples, the paper shows that there are many philosophical questions that can be addressed by using a linguistic corpus. However, linguistic corpora need not (and often cannot) replace traditional philosophical methods. Lastly, it argues that the special properties of linguistic corpora, including their independence and the current ease and cheapness of access, make them an indispensable resource for philosophers. (shrink)

Linguistic synesthesia (or synesthetic/intrafield/crossmodal metaphor) refers to crossmodal instances in which expressions in different sensory modalities are combined as in the case of sweet (taste) melody (hearing). Ullmann was among the first to show that synesthetic transfers seem to follow a potentially universal hierarchy that goes from the so-called “lower” (i.e., touch, taste and smell) to “higher” senses (i.e., hearing and sight). Several studies across languages, cultures, domains and text types seem to support the hierarchy in linguistic synesthesia (...) despite some crosslinguistic differences and varying explanations . To extend results to an underrepresented language and thus, to test the universality of the crossmodal hierarchy, 5,693 token cases of linguistic synesthesia in written and spoken Turkish were investigated using a general-purpose, large corpus. Token, type, and hapax legomena frequencies showed that although three backward and thus, hierarchy-inconsistent transfers (i.e., from taste to touch, from sight to smell and from sight to hearing) were more frequent than their hierarchy-consistent counterparts, forward transfers in the canonical direction were more frequent overall than the backward transfers in Turkish. We conclude that Turkish linguistic synesthesia complies with the hierarchy as a descriptive generalization. Results are discussed in comparison to the crossmodal use of sensory words in other languages. (shrink)

The received view in Chomskian linguistics is that linguistic intuitions are the product of a linguistic competence residing in a sub-central module of the mind. In Ignorance of Language I rejected this “Voice of Competence” view, and gave an answer of my own. I argued that intuitions are empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to phenomena. This led to an exchange with Nenad Miščević in which he defended VoC. Miščević has since returned to the issue, criticizing my sort of view, (...) which he labels “ordinarism”. Dunja Jutronić has already given an excellent response to these criticisms. I focus on revising and developing my view further. I emphasize that a person’s linguistic intuitions can be immediate perceptual judgments that do not arise from any conscious and deliberate exercise of her own competence. Should she feel the need for such an exercise, she is likely to begin with an understanding test not a production one. The mental processes involved in these deliberate tests are not aptly described as “simulations” of linguistic usage. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, (...) including the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

In this paper, we examine some basic linguistic abilities in a small sample of adults with minimal receptive vocabulary, whose receptive mental verbal age ranges from 1;2 to 3;10. In particular, we examine whether the participants in our study understand noun phrases consisting of a noun modified by an adjective. We use stimuli that they can recognise by name. Except for one participant, we find that, while all of them understand the noun and adjective in isolation, none seems to (...) understand these noun phrases, which means that they seem to not do linguistic composition. In order to test whether the difficulty is linguistic or conceptual, we ran two other studies, one on concept composition, and the other on iconic symbolic composition (composition of pictograms). Results suggest that linguistic composition is particularly difficult in this population, and that vocabulary breadth may not predict compositional abilities. (shrink)

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre‐registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based (...) on an 11‐dimensional representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co‐occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow‐up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/. (shrink)

: The open-ended character of natural languages calls for the hypothesis that humans are endowed with a recursive procedure generating sentences which are hierarchically organized. Structural relations such as c-command, expressed on hierarchical sentential representations, determine all sorts of formal and interpretive properties of sentences. The relevant computational principles are well beyond the reach of conscious introspection, so that studying such properties requires the formulation of precise formal hypotheses, and empirically testing them. This article illustrates all these aspects of (...) class='Hi'>linguistic research through the discussion of non-coreference effects. The article argues in favor of the formal linguistic approach based on hierarchical structures, and against alternatives based on vague notions of “analogical generalization”, and/or exploiting mere linear order. In the final part, the issue of cross-linguistic invariance and variation of non-coreference effects is addressed. Keywords: Linguistic Knowledge; Morphosyntactic Properties; Unconscious Computations; Coreference; Linguistic Representations Conoscenza linguistica e computazioni inconsce Riassunto: Il carattere aperto del linguaggio naturale avvalora l’ipotesi che gli esseri umani siano dotati di una procedura ricorsiva che genera frasi gerarchicamente organizzate. Relazioni strutturali come il c-comando, espresse su rappresentazioni frasali gerarchiche, determinano tutte le proprietà formali e interpretative delle frasi. I principi computazionali rilevanti sono totalmente al di fuori della portata della coscienza introspettiva e così lo studio di tali proprietà richiede la formulazione di precise ipotesi formali e la loro verifica sperimentale. Questo articolo illustra tutti questi aspetti della ricerca linguistica, esaminando gli effetti di non-coreferenza. Si argomenta in favore dell’approccio linguistico formale basato su strutture gerarchiche e contro alternative basate su vaghe nozioni di “generalizzazione analogica” e/o che impiegano il semplice ordine lineare. Nella parte finale si affronta il tema dell’invarianza e della variazione cross-linguistica degli effetti di non-coreferenza. Parole chiave: Conoscenza linguistica; Proprietà morfosintattiche; Computazioni inconsce; Coreferenzialità; Rappresentazioni linguistiche. (shrink)

Large databases of linguistic annotations are used for testing linguistic hypotheses and for training language processing models. These linguistic annotations are often syntactic or prosodic in nature, and have a hierarchical structure. Query languages are used to select particular structures of interest, or to project out large slices of a corpus for external analysis. Existing languages suffer from a variety of problems in the areas of expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness for linguistic query. We describe the domain (...) of linguistic trees and discuss the expressive requirements for a query language. Then we present a language that can express a wide range of queries over these trees, and show that the language is first-order complete over trees. (shrink)

The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Although researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either (a) remaining so, or (b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature ( but not both ). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations (...) and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, although other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested. (shrink)

Surprise is treated as an affect in Aristotelian philosophy as well as in Cartesian philosophy. In experimental psychology, surprise is considered to be an emotion. In phenomenology, it is only addressed indirectly (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas), with the important exception of Ricoeur and Maldiney; it is reduced to a break in cognition by cognitivists (Dennett). Only recently was it broached in linguistics, with a focus on lexico-syntactic categories. As for the expression of surprise, it has been studied in connection with evidentiality (...) in languages that encode surprise morphosyntactically. However, how surprise is encoded in languages that lack an evidential morphosyntactic system has been largely unexplored. This book provides new insights into the dynamics of surprise based on a heuristic hypothesis tested against the investigation of time, language and emotion. It is intended to arouse the interest of a multidisciplinary audience keen on crossing the disciplinary borders of phenomenology, cognitive sciences, and pragmatics. The theoretical approaches adopted in this collection of articles rely on experiments and corpus data. They advance knowledge by building on robust empirical results coming from psychology, microphenomenology, linguistics and physiology. (shrink)

Within legal scholarship and practice, among the most pervasive tasks is the interpretation of texts. And within legal interpretation, perhaps the most pervasive inquiry is the search for “ordinary meaning.” Jurists often treat ordinary meaning analysis as an empirical inquiry, aiming to discover a fact about how people understand language. When evaluating ordinary meaning, interpreters rely on dictionary definitions or patterns of common usage, increasingly via “legal corpus linguistics” approaches. However, the most central question about these popular methods remains open: (...) Do they reliably reflect ordinary meaning? This Article presents a series of experiments that assess whether (a) dictionary definitions and (b) common usage data reflect (c) how people actually understand language today. -/- The Article elaborates the implications of two main experimental results. First, neither the dictionary nor legal corpus linguistics methods reliably track ordinary people’s judgments about meaning. This shifts the argumentative burden to jurists who rely on these tools to identify “ordinary meaning” or “original public meaning”: these views must articulate and demonstrate a reliable method of analysis. Moreover, this divergence illuminates several interpretive fallacies. For example, advocates of legal corpus linguistics often contend that the nonappearance of a specific use in a corpus indicates that the use is not part of the relevant term’s ordinary meaning. The experiments reveal this claim to be a “Nonappearance Fallacy.” Ordinary meaning exceeds datasets of common usage — even very large ones. -/- Second, dictionary and legal corpus linguistics verdicts diverge dramatically from each other. Part of that divergence is explained by the finding that broad dictionary definitions tend to direct interpreters to extensive interpretations, while data of common usage tends to point interpreters to more prototypical cases. This suggests two different criteria that are often relevant in interpretation: a more extensive criterion and a more narrow, prototypical criterion. Although dictionaries and corpus linguistics might, in some cases, help us identify these criteria, a hard legal-philosophical question remains: Which of these two criteria should guide the interpretation of terms and phrases in legal texts? Insofar as there is no compelling case to prefer one, the results suggest that dictionary definitions, legal corpus linguistics, or even other more scientific measures of meaning may not be equipped in principle to deliver simple and unequivocal answers to inquiries about the so-called “ordinary meaning” of legal texts. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

Language has a rich typology of inferential types. It was recently shown that subjects are able to divide the informational content of new visual stimuli among the various slots of the inferential typology: when gestures or visual animations are used in lieu of specific words in a sentence, they can trigger the very same inferential types as language alone (Tieu et al., 2019 ). How general are the relevant triggering algorithms? We show that they extend to the auditory modality and (...) to music cognition. We tested whether pro-speech musical gestures, i.e. musical excerpts that replace words in sentences, can give rise to the same inferences. We show that it is possible to replicate the same typology of inferences using pro-speech music. Minimal and complex musical excerpts can behave just like language, gestures, and visual animations with respect to the logical behavior of their content when embedded in sentences. Specifically, we found that pro-speech music can generate scalar implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, and homogeneity inferences. (shrink)

The effects of psycholinguistic variables on reading development are critical to the evaluation of theories about the reading system. Although we know that the development of reading depends on both individual differences (endogenous) and item-level effects (exogenous), developmental research has focused mostly on average-level performance, ignoring individual differences. We investigated how the development of word recognition in Chinese children in both Chinese and English is affected by (a) item-level, exogenous effects (word frequency, radical consistency, and curricular grade level); (b) subject-level, (...) endogenous individual differences (orthographic awareness and phonological awareness); and (c) their interactive effect. We tested native Chinese (Putonghua)-speaking children (n = 763) in grades 1 to 6 with both Chinese character and English word identification (lexical) decision tasks. Our findings show that (a) there were effects of both word frequency and age of acquisition in both Chinese and English, but these item-level effects generally weakened with increasing age; (b) individual differences in phonological and orthographic awareness each contributed to successful performance; and (c) in Chinese, item-level effects were weaker for more proficient readers. We contend that our findings can be explained by theoretical models that incorporate cumulative learning as the basis for development of item-level effects in the reading system. (shrink)

Wales uses languages with both regular (Welsh) and irregular (English) counting systems. Three groups of 6- and 8-year-old Welsh children with varying degrees of exposure to the Welsh language—those who spoke Welsh at both home and school; those who spoke Welsh only at home; and those who spoke only English—were given standardized tests of arithmetic and a test of understanding representations of two-digit numbers. Groups did not differ on the arithmetic tests, but both groups of Welsh speakers read (...) and compared 2-digit numbers more accurately than monolingual English children. A similar study was carried out with Tamil/English bilingual children in England. The Tamil counting system is more transparent than English but less so than Welsh or Chinese. Tamil-speaking children performed better than monolingual English-speaking children on one of the standardized arithmetic tests but did not differ in their comparison of two-digit numbers. Reasons for the findings are discussed. (shrink)

Donnellan makes a convincing case for two distinct uses ofdefinite descriptions. But does the difference between the usesreflects an ambiguity in the semantics of descriptions? This paperapplies a linguistic test for ambiguity to argue that the differencebetween the uses is not semantically significant.

Recent studies on cortical processing of sensory information highlight the importance of multisensory integration, and define precise rules governing reciprocal influences between inputs of different sensory modalities. We propose that psychophysical interactions between different types of sensory stimuli and linguistic synaesthesia share common origins and mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we compare neurophysiological findings with corpus-based analyses relating to linguistic synaesthesia. Namely, we present Williams' hypothesis and its recent developments about the hierarchy of synaesthetic pairings, and examine critical (...) aspects of this theory concerning universality, directionality, sensory categories, and usage of corpora. These theoretical issues are verified against linguistic data derived from corpus-based analyses of Italian synaesthetic pairings related to auditory and tactile modalities. Our findings reveal a strong parallel between linguistic synaesthesia and neurophysiological interactions between different sensory stimuli, suggesting that linguistic synaesthesia is affected by tendencies similar to the rules underlying the perceptual association of distinct sensory modalities. (shrink)

Statistical learning is often taken to lie at the heart of many cognitive tasks, including the acquisition of language. One particular task in which probabilistic models have achieved considerable success is the segmentation of speech into words. However, these models have mostly been tested against English data, and as a result little is known about how a statistical learning mechanism copes with input regularities that arise from the structural properties of different languages. This study focuses on statistical word segmentation in (...) Arabic, a Semitic language in which words are built around consonantal roots. We hypothesize that segmentation in such languages is facilitated by tracking consonant distributions independently from intervening vowels. Previous studies have shown that human learners can track consonant probabilities across intervening vowels in artificial languages, but it is unknown to what extent this ability would be beneficial in the segmentation of natural language. We assessed the performance of a Bayesian segmentation model on English and Arabic, comparing consonant-only representations with full representations. In addition, we examined to what extent structurally different proto-lexicons reflect adult language. The results suggest that for a child learning a Semitic language, separating consonants from vowels is beneficial for segmentation. These findings indicate that probabilistic models require appropriate linguistic representations in order to effectively meet the challenges of language acquisition. (shrink)

Traditional flat-structured bigram and trigram models of phonotactics are useful because they capture a large number of facts about phonological processes. Additionally, these models predict that local interactions should be easier to learn than long-distance ones because long-distance dependencies are difficult to capture with these models. Long-distance phonotactic patterns have been observed by linguists in many languages, who have proposed different kinds of models, including feature-based bigram and trigram models, as well as precedence models. Contrary to flat-structured bigram and trigram (...) models, these alternatives capture unbounded dependencies because at an abstract level of representation, the relevant elements are locally dependent, even if they are not adjacent at the observable level. Using an artificial grammar learning paradigm, we provide additional support for these alternative models of phonotactics. Participants in two experiments were exposed to a long-distance consonant-harmony pattern in which the first consonant of a five-syllable word was [s] or [∫] (“sh”) and triggered a suffix that was either [-su] or [-∫u] depending on the sibilant quality of this first consonant. Participants learned this pattern, despite the large distance between the trigger and the target, suggesting that when participants learn long-distance phonological patterns, that pattern is learned without specific reference to distance. (shrink)

Stuart M. Shieber’s name is well known to computational linguists for his research and to computer scientists more generally for his debate on the Loebner Turing Test competition, which appeared a decade earlier in Communications of the ACM. 1 With this collection, I expect it to become equally well known to philosophers.