Suboptimist

Unprecedented nerdiness.

Wow, I’m updating. I really fear that updating this blog may become a once-a-week affair. That’s no good.

I had to present on an article I read* [which I can’t post for copyright reasons] in class. The presentation was supposed to take about an hour, but since I had the shortest article on the list, it ran short. I began to ad-lib, and brought up a question I raised while reading the paper: are phonological features innate or inferred? In other words, are phonological features pre-specified for us by Universal Grammar, or do we figure it out for ourselves by some sort of stochastic learning mechanism? I’m not sure.

The article I read presented experimental evidence in favor of the latter explanation. Infants, being keenly sensitive to phonetic contrast, when exposed to a bimodal distribution of speech sounds discriminate speech sounds better than infants that are exposed to unimodal distributions. That is to say, they better pick up on relevant properties of the different sounds.

On the other hand, when we make vowels, human languages only contrast in tongue height and tongue backness. However, it isn’t physiologically impossible to move our tongue, say, right and left. We just don’t do it for anything involving speech. That could be evidence in favor of innate specification.

As far as Universal Grammar is concerned, I remain agnostic. I see how it can be a useful construct in the realm of syntax, but it seems less relevant to things like phonology, notwithstanding Chomsky’s desire to have a unified theory of syntax and phonology. Syntax and phonology are very different things. Syntax is only concerned with what is happening in the mind of a speaker. Phonology, on the other hand, necessarily interacts with the physical world, for example, the shape of the vocal tract, the construction of the auditory system, and so on. So yeah, big questions.

Also, Eternal Sonata.