Colloquium Featuring Ben Eischens

A Wug Test of Tone Sandhi in San Martín Peras Mixtec

In this talk, we describe a phonetically-natural tone sandhi process in San Martín Peras Mixtec (SMP Mixtec), an Otomanguean language of western Oaxaca, Mexico. In this process, some adjectives that usually begin with a high tone (e.g., [káˀnũ], 'big') surface with an initial rising tone (e.g., [kǎˀnũ]) in particular tonal contexts. This alternation is lexically-specific, but there are clear phonological tendencies in which adjectives it applies to. However, the process is highly variable, making these generalizations potentially difficult for learners of SMP Mixtec to extract. To test whether speakers of the language form grammatical generalizations based on the lexical tendencies, we carried out an online wug test with 23 SMP Mixtec-speaking participants. We find that participants extended the most general version of the tone sandhi process, but not the lexical tendencies, to novel forms. We use these results to argue that substantive bias -- the idea that phonetically-natural phonological patterns are easier to learn -- is not strong enough to drive learning of phonological tendencies in the face of variable data.

Ben Eischens is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. His research focuses primarily on phonology, phonetics, and the interaction between the two, with most of his work investigating tone and phonation in San Martín Peras Mixtec (SMP Mixtec). SMP Mixtec is an Otomanguean language spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico as well as by diaspora communities throughout Mexico and the US. This research also involves language documentation and description, as well as collaborative community work.

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