[language] On the Origin of Internal Structure of Word Forms

[H. Mark Hubey]

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [evol-psych] On the Origin of Internal Structure of Word Forms
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 08:39:00 +0100
From: "Ian Pitchford" <ian.pitchford at scientist.com>
Reply-To: "Ian Pitchford" <Ian.Pitchford at scientist.com>
Organization: http://www.human-nature.com/
To: <evolutionary-psychology at egroups.com>

>From today's Science (items can be purchased separately if you do not have a
subscription)

Volume 288, Number 5465 Issue of 21 Apr 2000, pp. 449 - 451
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/288/5465/449

LANGUAGE:
Movement Patterns in Spoken Language
John L. Locke

When babies start to babble, they babble some sounds more often than others.
In his Perspective, Locke discusses the findings of a new analysis of
babbling babies in environments where English or other languages such as
French, Swedish, or Japanese are spoken (MacNeilage and Davis). It turns out
that babies preferentially babble four sequences of consonant and vowel
sounds, a tendency that is reflected in the structure of protowords found in
many of the world's languages.

The author is in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of
Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RQ, UK, and also holds an
appointment in the Department of Human Communication Sciences at the
University of Sheffield. E-mail: jl271 at cam.ac.uk

______

Volume 288, Number 5465 Issue of 21 Apr 2000, pp. 527 - 531
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/288/5465/527

On the Origin of Internal Structure of Word Forms
Peter F. MacNeilage, 1* Barbara L. Davis 2

This study shows that a corpus of proto-word forms shares four sequential
sound patterns with words of modern languages and the first words of infants.
Three of the patterns involve intrasyllabic consonant-vowel (CV)
co-occurrence: labial (lip) consonants with central vowels, coronal (tongue
front) consonants with front vowels, and dorsal (tongue back) consonants with
back vowels. The fourth pattern is an intersyllabic preference for initiating
words with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant sequence (LC). The CV
effects may be primarily biomechanically motivated. The LC effect may be
self-organizational, with multivariate causality. The findings support the
hypothesis that these four patterns were basic to the origin of words.

1 Department of Psychology,
2 Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Texas,
Austin, TX 78712, USA.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
macneilage at psy.utexas.edu

Full text:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/288/5465/527

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