The present article analyzes the meaning and form of onomatopoeias in Tjwao, a Khoe-Kwadi (Kalahari Khoe) language. Making use of a prototype approach to categorization, a corpus of 113 onomatopoeic lexemes were tested for their compliance with the semantic, phonetic, and morphological features associated with the prototype of onomatopoeias in scholarly literature. The evidence demonstrates that Tjwao onomatopoeias tend to instantiate the prototype fully. This signifies, in turn, that, as far as their phonetics and morphology are concerned, Tjwao onomatopoeias tend to be extra-systematic.

Theories of phonology claim variously that phonological elements are either innate or emergent, and either substance-full or substance-free. A hitherto underdeveloped source of evidence for choosing between the four possible combinations of these claims lies in showing precisely how a child can acquire phonological elements. This article presents computer simulations that showcase a learning algorithm with which the learner creates phonological elements from a large number of sound–meaning pairs. In the course of language acquisition, phonological features gradually emerge both bottom-up and top-down, that is, both from the phonetic input (i.e., sound) and from the semantic or morphological input (i.e., structured meaning). In our computer simulations, the child's phonological features end up with emerged links to sounds (phonetic substance) as well as with emerged links to meanings (semantic substance), without containing either phonetic or semantic substance. These simulations therefore show that emergent substance-free phonological features are learnable. In the absence of learning algorithms for linking innate features to the language-specific variable phonetic reality, as well as the absence of learning algorithms for substance-full emergence, these results provide a new type of support for theories of phonology in which features are emergent and substance-free.

We argue that the representational primes of the human phonological faculty, the so-called distinctive features, are innate and substance-free. Our arguments for the innateness of features are built on traditional and novel logical arguments, experimental evidence accumulating over recent decades, and somewhat detailed proposals about their neurobiological reality. As symbols in the brain, features are substance-free, that is, they are devoid of articulatory and acoustic content, or even any direct reference to such phenomena. This is consistent with our substance-free conception of phonological computation, an approach that eschews functionalist notions like markedness, ease of articulation, and so on. We also outline a neural model of the phonetics-phonology interface called Cognitive Phonetics, which transduces innate features to speech articulation and from speech acoustics. These extra-grammatical transduction procedures are also part of the human biological endowment, which leaves no room for language-specific phonetics in our theory of the externalization of language. We show how Cognitive Phonetics can account for traditionally recognized intersegmental coarticulation, as well as the previously unexplored intrasegmental coarticulation, strongly suggesting that the basic units of speech production are transduced features.

The aim of this study is to determine whether it is the phonetic or phonological effect on processing that is stronger when the two effects are in conflict. Results are presented from a recall experiment, in which speakers of French and Tłı̨chǫ (Dene, Canada) recall syllables with either H or L tone. While French speakers remembered H syllables more accurately, Tłı̨chǫ speakers remembered L tones more accurately. The findings show simultaneous effects of phonetics and phonology, and have implications for notions of salience and how it can be measured as well as for the different types of salience that are active in speech sound processing.

In this article, we address relations between lexical and phonological development, with an emphasis on the notion of phonological contrast. We begin with an overview of the literature on word learning and on infant speech perception. Among other results, we report on studies showing that toddlers’ perceptual abilities do not correlate with the development of phonological contrasts within their lexicons. We then engage in a systematic comparison between the lexical development of two child learners of English and their acquisition of consonants in syllable onsets. We establish a developmental timeline for each child's onset consonant system, which we compare to the types of phonological contrasts that are present in their expressive vocabularies at each relevant milestone. Like the earlier studies, ours also fails to return tangible parallels between the two areas of development. The data instead suggest that patterns of phonological development are best described in terms of the segmental categories they involve, in relative independence from measures of contrastiveness within the learners’ lexicons.

As children learn language, they spontaneously imitate the speech of those around them. This article investigates the new words that five children imitated between 1 and 2 years of age. Children were more likely to imitate new words as they aged and as their productive language developed. After controlling for age, children also were more likely to imitate new words that were shorter and with high neighborhood densities, and that contained sounds the children had previously produced accurately. Together, the findings demonstrate that both the patterns of the target words and children's productive abilities are predictors of children's imitative speech. This supports models of language development where there are influences stemming not only from phonological and lexical representations, but also from phonetic representations.