This study investigates infants' transition from nonverbal to verbal communication using evidence from regression patterns. As an example of regressions, prelinguistic infants learning American Sign Language (ASL) use pointing gestures to communicate. At the onset of single signs, however, these gestures disappear. Petitto (1987) attributed the regression to the children's discovery that pointing has two functions, namely, deixis and linguistic pronouns. The 1:2 relation (1 form, 2 functions) violates the simple 1:1 pattern that infants are believed to expect. This kind of conflict, Petitto argued, explains the regression. Based on the additional observation that the regression coincided with the boundary between prelinguistic and linguistic communication, Petitto concluded that the prelinguistic and linguistic periods are autonomous. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the 1:1 model and to determine whether it explains a previously reported regression of intonation in English. Background research showed that gestures and intonation have different forms but the same pragmatic meanings, a 2:1 form-function pattern that plausibly precipitates the regression. The hypothesis of the study was that gestures and intonation are closely related. Moreover, because gestures and intonation change in the opposite direction, the negative correlation between them indicates a robust inverse relationship. To test this prediction, speech samples of 29 infants (8 to 16 months) were analyzed acoustically and compared to parent-report data on several verbal and gestural scales. In support of the hypothesis, gestures alone were inversely correlated with intonation. In addition, the regression model explains nonlinearities stemming from different form-function configurations. However, the results failed to support the claim that regressions linked to early words or signs reflect autonomy. The discussion ends with a focus on the special role of intonation in children's transition from "prelinguistic" communication to language.

The current contribution analyses quantifying prosodic aspects in two Middle Bavarian varieties, Standard Austrian German and the Viennese dialect. State of the art phonological accounts of the Middle Bavarian dialects assume a mutual interaction between vowel and consonant length: long vowels are followed by lenis consonants, short vowels are followed by fortis consonants, further vowel + consonant sequences are proscribed in the Middle Bavarian dialects. In this analysis, this assumption was tested by incorporating the allegedly disallowed sequences long vowel + fortis consonant. Results show that this sequence is not integrated into the presumed Middle Bavarian temporal patterns, but have to be dealt with separately. These results shed a new light on the Middle Bavarian quantity relationships which are discussed within two possible theoretical frameworks, one assuming a two-way opposition in consonants, the other a three-way opposition. Generally, the necessary integration of a third category brings about a revision of the Middle Bavarian quantity relations which is more easily reconcilable with the complex phonotactic structures observable in the Middle Bavarian varieties than the previously assumed pattern of a mutual interaction between vowel and consonant length.

We present a study aimed at investigating how novel signs emerge and spread through a community of interacting individuals. Ten triads of participants played a game in which players created novel signs in order to communicate with each other while constantly rotating between the role of interlocutor and that of observer. The main result of the study was that, for a majority of the triads, communicative success was not shared by the three dyads of players in a triad. This imbalance appears to be due to individual differences in game performance as well as to uncooperative behaviors. We suggest that both of these are magnified by the social dynamics induced by the role rotations in the game.

I suggest four grounds on which an argument can be made that phonological language forms are not merely emergent properties of the public language use of members of a language community. They are: 1) the existence of spontaneous errors of speech production in which whole consonants or vowels misorder or are replaced; 2) the necessary existence of language "particles" used by individual language users in order for words to be able to be coined; 3) the remarkable effectiveness of alphabetic writing systems and the tight coupling among skilled readers of orthographic and phonological language forms; 4) the finding that, by late infancy, children have discovered phonological constancies despite phonetic variation.

Assuming a framework of privative features, this paper interprets two apparently disparate phenomena in English phonology as structurally related: the lexically specific voicing of fricatives in plural nouns like wives or thieves and the prosodically governed "flapping" of medial /t/ (and /d/) in North American varieties, which we claim is itself not a rule per se, but rather a consequence of the laryngeal weakening of fortis /t/ in interaction with speech-rate determined segmental abbreviation. Taking as our point of departure the Dimensional Theory of laryngeal representation developed by Avery & Idsardi (2001), along with their assumption that English marks voiceless obstruents but not voiced ones (Iverson & Salmons 1995), we find that an unexpected connection between fricative voicing and coronal flapping emerges from the interplay of familiar phonemic and phonetic factors in the phonological system.

The question to be addressed in this paper is how a language which is fundamentally monosyllabic in structure can have about a dozen different reduplication types with at least eight different linguistic functions. The language under discussion, American Sign Language (ASL), is one representative of a class of languages that makes widespread use of reduplication for lexical and morphological purposes. The goal here is to present the set of phonological features that permit the productive construction of these forms and a first approximation to the feature geometry in which they participate. Reduplication forms are dependent on the event structure of the predicate and the associated aspectual modifications.