Do speakers know universal restrictions on linguistic elements that are absent from their language? We report an experimental test of this question. Our case study concerns the universal restrictions on initial consonant sequences, onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, certain onset clusters (e.g., lb) are dispreferred (e.g., systematically under-represented) relative to others (e.g., bl). We demonstrate such preferences among Korean speakers, whose language lacks initial C1C2 clusters altogether. Our demonstration exploits speakers' well known tendency to misperceive ill-formed clusters. We show that universally dispreferred onset clusters are more frequently misperceived than universally preferred ones, indicating that Korean speakers consider the former cluster-type more ill-formed. The misperception of universally ill-formed clusters is unlikely to be due to a simple auditory failure. Likewise, the aversion of universally dispreferred onsets by Korean speakers is not explained by English proficiency or by several phonetic and phonological properties of Korean. We conclude that language universals are neither relics of language change nor are they artifacts of generic limitations on auditory perception and motor control-they reflect universal linguistic knowledge, active in speakers' brains.optimality theory ͉ phonology ͉ sonority ͉ syllable T he ''nature vs. nurture'' debate concerns the origin of speakers' knowledge of their language. Both sides of this controversy presuppose that people have some knowledge of abstract linguistic regularities. They disagree on whether such regularities reflect the properties of linguistic experience, auditory perception, and motor control (1, 2) or universal, possibly innate, and domain-specific restrictions on language structure (3-5, **). Empirical support for such restrictions comes from linguistic universals: regularities exhibited across the world's languages. These universals, for example, assert that the sound sequence lbif makes a poor word, whereas the sequence blif is better: Languages always make use of words like blif before (as in Russian) resorting to words like lbif. But the significance of such observations is unclear. One view holds that language universals form part of the language faculty of all speakers (5-7). The alternative denies that speakers have knowledge of language universals. Rather, speakers simply know regularities (either structural or statistical) concerning words in their own language. Language universals are not mentally represented-they are only statistical tendencies, shaped by generic (auditory and motor) constraints on language evolution (8). For example, words beginning with lb have a tendency to decline relative to those beginning with bl because the former are more frequently mispronounced or misperceived. The question at hand, then, is whether language universals are active in the brains of all speakers, or mere relics of systematic language change and its distal generic causes?The matter is difficult to resolve bec...

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This study investigates the underlying tonal pattern of pitch accent, tone interaction, focus effects, and the prosodic structure of Northern Kyungsang Korean (NKK) by examining tone-syllable alignment and the realization of pitch accent in different tonal/prosodic contexts. Based on quantitative data, we propose that the underlying tone of pitch accent is H*+L and that the left edge of a prosodic word is marked by a low boundary tone (%L). Our observation, with respect to the tone interaction of different lexical classes, shows evidence in favor of the downstep/ upstep account [Kenstowicz & Sohn (1997) Focus and phrasing in Northern Kyungsang Korean. In P.-M. Bertinetto (Ed.), Certamen Phonologicum III, (pp. 137-156). Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier. (Also in MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 30, 25-47, 1997)], as opposed to the H-tone deletion account (e.g., G. Kim (1988) The Pitch-accent System of the Taegu Dialect of Korean with Emphasis on Tone Sandhi at the Phrasal Level, PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii.). The data also indicate that surface representations of NKK are sparsely specified for tone. Most importantly, we found that the prosodic cue of focus differs depending on the location of the pitch accent within a prosodic word. We conclude that the prosodic goal of focus in NKK is in the pitch range expansion of the focused phrase, which is implemented by expanding the pitch range of the most prominent word within the phrase, regardless of whether it is the focused word or not.

In the theory of articulatory phonology Browman & Goldstein (1986, 1990, 1992) claim that place assimilation is mainly the result of the overlap of gestures and the perception of these overlapping gestures as a single gesture. Ohala (1990) makes a similar claim. The present study provides interesting experimental evidence against this explanation of assimilation as a result of gestural overlap and resulting misperception, and for the importance of gestural reduction.

Korean possesses a rich onomatopoeic and mimetic vocabulary that may be augmented by partial reduplication and/or suffixation. This augmented category, which is referred to as partial extension in Jun (1993), is semantically characterised by a lengthening, or temporal extension of the base form: