The complete title of this book runs ‘Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R’ and as such it very well reflects the purpose and spirit of the book. The author guides the reader in about 350 pages from descriptive and basic statistical methods over classification and clustering to (generalised) linear and mixed models. Each of the methods is introduced in the context of concrete linguistic problems and demonstrated on exciting datasets from current research in the language sciences. In line with its practical orientation, the book focuses primarily on using the methods and interpreting the results. This implies that the mathematical treatment of the techniques is held at a minimum if not absent from the book. In return, the reader is provided with very detailed explanations on how to conduct the analyses using R [1]. The first chapter sets the tone being a 20-page introduction to R. For this and all subsequent chapters, the R code is intertwined with the chapter text and the datasets and functions used are conveniently packaged in the languageR package that is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). With this approach, the author has done an excellent job in enabling researchers and students alike to reproduce the analyses and learn by doing. Another quality as a textbook is the fact that every chapter ends with Workbook sections where the user is invited to exercise his or her analysis skills on supplemental datasets. Full solutions including code, results and comments are given in Appendix A (30 pages). Instructors are therefore very well served by this text, although they might want to balance the book with some more mathematical treatment depending on the target audience. After the introductory chapter on R, the book opens on graphical data exploration. Chapter 3 treats probability distributions and common sampling distributions. Under basic statistical methods (Chapter 4), distribution tests and tests on means and variances are covered. Chapter 5 deals with clustering and classification. Strangely enough, the clustering section has material on PCA, factor analysis, correspondence analysis and includes only one subsection on clustering, devoted notably to hierarchical partitioning methods. The classification part deals with decision trees, discriminant analysis and support vector machines. The regression chapter (Chapter 6) treats linear models, generalised linear models, piecewise linear models and a substantial section on models for lexical richness. The final chapter on mixed models is particularly interesting as it is one of the few text book accounts that introduce the reader to using the (innovative) lme4 package of Douglas Bates which implements linear mixed-effects models. Moreover, the case studies included in this

Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR. Lydia White. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 316. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper. Actually, I could justifiably end my review here. Lydia White has come out with a new textbook on Universal Grammar (UG) and SLA; buy it. End of story. Still, I have 724 words left, so for those readers whose SLA research has been conducted on a different planet, let me pad things out a bit.

Second language acquisition and universal grammar

"The Companion to Phonology" will be the major reference work of the field, drawing together nearly 150 contributions from almost all of the globally recognized, leading scholars in an estimated five-volume set. The international editorial team represents a diverse range of approaches and methodologies to the field, with the objective of creating a truly theoretically balanced work that will be of use to all phonologists and linguists. Different from all handbooks and other reference works for phonology which are available at present, the focus will be on empirical facts, rather than on theoretical insights. The Companion will function as a touchstone for future phonological theories: whenever somebody wants to propose a new theory for some phenomenon, she will be able to find all the relevant facts and insights which need to be accounted for in this work. The work will be organized thematically, and by volume: I. The Segment and Below II. The Segment and Above III. Changes and Processes IV. Interfaces V. Methodologies. In terms of competition, there is no other work currently available with this scope. There are large encyclopedic works covering the field of linguistics, such as "The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics", second edition, edited by Keith Brown (Elsevier, 2005); the approach and scope of this sort of work is clearly distinct from the proposed Companion, which is comprised of essays of 8,000- 10,000 words each to allow a fuller exploration of each topic. The Companion is not intended to be encyclopedic, but to offer an overview of the field as it currently stands. Shorter reference works such as the "Blackwell Handbook of Phonological Theory" (edited by John Goldsmith, 1996), or the "Cambridge Handbook of Phonology" (edited by Paul DeLacy, CUP, 2007) differ most obviously in their scope: "Goldsmith's Handbook" has 32 articles in it; DeLacy's has 25; a larger work allows more depth, nuance, and information. The Companion is also theoretically positioned as a work primarily for researchers.

Blackwell Companion to Phonology

In this article I discuss the selection and assembly of formal features in second language acquisition. Assembling the particular lexical items of a second language (L2) requires that the learner reconfi gure features from the way these are represented in the first language (L1) into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2. I illustrate the nature of the problem by comparing the assembly and expression of features involved in plural-marking in English, Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and situate this comparison with respect to specific claims of the Nominal Mapping Parameter and within a discussion of parameter (re)setting more generally. I conclude with a few even more general thoughts on the role of Universal Grammar (UG) in (second) language acquisition.

https://sla.sjtu.edu.cn/thesis/some%20thoughts%20on%20the%20contrastive%20analysis%20of%20features%20in%20second%20language%20acquisition.pdf

Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition

The Discovery of Spoken Language, Peter W. Jusczyk (Ed.). MIT Press (1997), ISBN 0 262 10058 4

In this article, we argue against the Representational Deficit Hypothesis, according to which second language (L2) speakers can never acquire functional categories or features that are absent in the first language (L1), suggesting that fossilization is inevitable. Instead, we support the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, which argues that the ultimate attainment of L2 speakers is constrained by L1 prosodic representations; these representations can, however, be minimally adapted to accommodate the needs of the L2 under certain conditions. We investigate the L2 acquisition of English by 10 Mandarin speakers, by means of an experiment involving judgement and production of tense and participial morphology. Mandarin lacks overt tense inflection, while English inflection is represented by adjunction to the Prosodic Word, an option not available in Mandarin. We show that Mandarin speakers have few problems interpreting English tense appropriately, contrary to the predictions of the Representational Deficit Hypothes...

Ultimate attainment in interlanguage grammars: a prosodic approach

Several recent investigations of the development of left-edge clusters in West Germanic languages have demonstrated that the relative sonority of adjacent consonants plays a key role in children’s reduction patterns (e.g. Fikkert 1994, Gilbers & Den Ouden 1994, Chin 1996, Barlow 1997, Bernhardt & Stemberger 1998, Gierut 1999, Ohala 1999, Gnanadesikan this volume). These authors have argued that, for a number of children, at the stage in development when only one member of a left-edge cluster is produced, it is the least sonorous segment that survives, regardless of where this segment appears in the target string or the structural position that it occupies (head, dependent, or appendix). To briefly illustrate, while the more sonorous /S/ 2 is lost in favour of the stop in /S/+stop clusters, /S/ is retained in /S/+sonorant clusters; similarly, the least sonorous stop survives in both /S/+stop and stop+sonorant clusters, in spite of the fact that it occurs in different positions in the two strings. To account for reduction patterns such as these, a structural difference between /S/-initial and stop-initial clusters need not be assumed. This would seem to fare well in view of much of the recent constraint-based literature which de-emphasises the role of prosodic constituency in favour of phonetically-based explanations of phonological phenomena (see e.g. Hamilton 1996, Wright 1996, Kochetov 1999, Steriade 1999, Cote 2000). In this paper, we focus on a second set of reduction patterns for left-edge clusters, one which is not addressed in most of the sonority-based literature on cluster reduction in child language (L1): these patterns reveal a preference for structural heads to survive. For example, while the stop is retained in clusters of the shape /S/+stop and stop+sonorant, it is the sonorant that survives in /S/+sonorant clusters. The only sources that we have found where explicit reference is made to the retention of heads are Spencer (1986), who reanalyses Amahl’s data

/pdf/input-elaboration-head-faithfulness-and-evidence-for-5dpogx0y2f.pdf

Input Elaboration, Head Faithfulness and Evidence for Representation in the Acquisition of Left-edge Clusters in West Germanic

It is proposed that failure to consistently produce inflectional morphology by
Mandarin-speaking learners of English is due to properties of the L1 prosodic
phonology which are transferred into the interlanguage grammar. While English
requires inflection to be adjoined to the ProsodicWord, Mandarin does not permit
this structure. Inflection in Mandarin is instead incorporated into the PWd of the
stem to which it attaches. It is shown that Mandarin speakers fall into two groups
in their treatment of English inflectional morphology. One group of learners is
sensitive to the need for a unified analysis of inflection. They recognize that
English does not permit a stem-internal analysis of this morphology, but as their
grammars do not permit adjunction, inflection is deleted across-the-board. For the
other group, inflection surfaces variably, for those stimuli where the shape of the
stem enables it to be incorporated into the PWd, as in the L1. 
Il est propose que l'incapacite pour les locuteurs du mandarin de produire systematiquement
la morphologie flexionnelle de l'anglais est due aux propri etes de la
phonologie prosodique de la L1 qui sont transferees dans la grammaire interlangue.
Alors que la flexion doit etre adjointe au mot prosodique en anglais, le mandarin
ne permet pas cette structure. La flexion du mandarin est plutot incorporee dans
le mot prosodique du radical auquel elle s'attache. Il est montre que les locuteurs
du mandarin se divisent en deux groupes selon leur traitement de la morphologie
flexionnelle de l'anglais. Un groupe d'apprenants est sensible a la necessite d'une
analyse unifiee de la flexion. Ils reconnaissent que l'anglais ne permet pas une
analyse de la morphologie flexionnelle a l'interieur du radical, mais comme leur
grammaire ne permet pas l'adjonction, la flexion est simplement supprimee. Pour
l'autre groupe, la flexion fait surface de facon variable ; elle est realisee lorsque
la forme du radical lui permet d'etre incorporee dans le mot prosodique comme
dans la L1.

Missing Inflection in L2 Acquisition: Defective Syntax or L1-Constrained Prosodic Representations?

Many L2 speakers fail to supply functional morphology consistently in production. In this paper, the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) is proposed, where this is attributed to L1 constraints on prosodic structure. The PTH maintains that functional material which is appropriately represented in syntax may be deleted in production if prosodic structures necessary in the L2 cannot be built from L1 structures. When non-target-like L1 structures are used to accommodate L2 functional material, use is variable and there are asymmetries in the contexts where it appears. The present focus is on an end-state Turkish-speaking learner of English. It is shown that the prosodic structures available in Turkish can be minimally adapted to yield the structure required for English inflection, where the speaker is highly accurate. To represent English articles, the required structure cannot be built from L1 structures; hence, rate of suppliance is lower and is largely determined by phonological context.

Ultimate Attainment of L2 Inflection: Effects of L1 Prosodic Structure

An analysis is provided of the consonant harmony (CH) patterns exhibited in the speech of one child, Amahl at Stage 1 (data from Smith 1973). It is argued that the standard rule-based analysis which involves Coronal underspecification and planar segregation is not tenable. First, the data reveal an underspecification paradox: coronal consonants are targets for CH and should thus be unspecified for Coronal. However, they also trigger harmony, in words where the targets are liquids. Second, the data are not consistent with planar segregation, as one harmony pattern is productive beyond the point when AmahlOs grammar satisfies the requirements for planar segregation (set forth in McCarthy 1989). An alternative analysis is proposed within the constraint-based framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). It is argued that CH follows from the relative ranking of constraints which parse place features and those which align features with the edges of the prosodic word. With the constraints responsible for parsing and aligning Labial and Dorsal ranked above those responsible for parsing and aligning Coronal, the dual behaviour of coronals can be captured. The effect of planar segregation follows from other independently motivated constraints which force alignment to be satisfied through copying of segmental material, not through spreading.

/pdf/consonant-harmony-in-child-language-an-optimality-theoretic-3m8pc2wc0q.pdf

Heather Goad

Papers

Ultimate attainment in interlanguage grammars: a prosodic approach

Input Elaboration, Head Faithfulness and Evidence for Representation in the Acquisition of Left-edge Clusters in West Germanic

Missing Inflection in L2 Acquisition: Defective Syntax or L1-Constrained Prosodic Representations?

Ultimate Attainment of L2 Inflection: Effects of L1 Prosodic Structure

Consonant Harmony in Child Language: An Optimality-theoretic Account*