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The relationship between underlying phonological representations and phonetic realization is explored. Specific examples of the features: advanced tongue root, sonority, liquid and tenseness are discussed in detail. The relationship between the terms: contoid, vocoid, consonant and vowel is also considered.

An alternative to the standard views of phonology is presented, to take into account the critical issues raised in the preceding chapters. Declarative phonology is polysystemic, non-segmental and abstract; it specifically excludes derivation and deletion as valid phonological mechanisms. Phonological structures are underspecified attribute-value matrices which attach to syllable structure at any level (syllable, onset, rhyme, nucleus, coda, or even higher, e.g. foot). Attribute-value matrices can be represented as underspecified tree diagrams. Phonetic implementation is exemplified and examples from Irish, Malay, German and Scots Gaelic are worked through.

This chapter discusses the activities, cognitive development, and learning progress of Ricky when he was between 19–20 months old. At this stage, Ricky's knowledge was piecemeal because while it was not totally organized, it was neither completely simple nor concrete. He was able to operative on various levels of complexity and abstractness with minimal knowledge. However, he still lacked the intricate web of integrated knowledge required for context-appropriate, mature behaviour.

One of the central ways in which the long-standing debate between rationalists and empiricists surfaces in linguistics involves the putative existence of abstract phonological representations underlying seemingly more concrete surface forms. Linguists ranging from Panini to Chomsky and Halle have employed highly abstract representations, whereas the relatively recent rise of statistical and parallelist conceptions of language and cognition has led others to more surface-oriented views of phonology. In this chapter we review psycholinguistic and phonological evidence on both sides of the abstractness question in the domain of prosodic structure, with a focus on Abkhaz stress assignment and the representation of lexical prosody in Optimality Theory. We conclude that the weight of the evidence supports the existence of abstract underlying prosodic structure, even when it is predictable.

The author of this chapter addresses the question of whether language universals are caused or uncaused. He reviews the conservativity property of determiners―a true language universal unexplainable by external factors, logical relations, generic laws of thought, or processing constraints. The explanation lies in the fact that no child could learn a nonconservative determiner. Thus, constraints on internal computations in the domain of language explain both this universal and the impossibility of nonconservative determiners. According to the author, the truths that are observed in linguistics are not necessary truths, but rather the outcome of a rational integration between empirical data and our science-forming faculty. Since linguists cannot assume the pre-existence of the properties of their object of study, linguistics resembles physics rather than mathematics or biology.

Bever calls grammar “the epicenter of all language behavior” but observes that the relation between grammar and models of linguistic behavior remains unclear. This chapter reviews some major advances in our understanding of common features of diverse grammar formalisms. Stabler argues that mild context-sensitive grammars can both define the sentences of human languages (weak adequacy) and also provide the structures of those languages (strong adequacy). He also points out that different formalisms (context-free grammars (CFG), tree-adjoining grammars (TAG), combinatory categorial grammars (CCG), set-local multicomponent grammars (MCTAG), abstract categorial grammars (ACG_2,4), multiple context-free grammars (MCFG), Minimalist grammars (MG), and context-sensitive grammars (CSG)) are weakly equivalent in the sense that they define exactly the same sets of sentences. These grammars are expressive enough to define the discontinuous dependencies of human languages. Furthermore, computational methods provide tools for describing rather abstract similarities of structures and languages.

This chapter reviews research that has refined our knowledge of the mind of the neonate by progressively reducing the age of the subjects under study. Throughout the decades, it had become clear that prosodic cues are essential for children to develop their knowledge of words, but research had not identified reliable acoustic characteristics for the different rhythmic classes of languages. Mehler’s research leads to the conclusion that vowels and consonants are specialized for different tasks: vowels are mainly specialized for conveying information about grammar, whereas consonants are used to individuate previously learned words.  Humans are born with a left-hemisphere superiority to process species-specific properties of speech, such as the difference between vowels and consonants. Mehler also reviews some recent research on infant memory.

This chapter argues that opaque phonological analyses based on abstract elements can be justified by employing domain-general reasoning. The authors treat abstractness in phonology from a Bayesian perspective by examining opacity in Kalaallisut, an Inuit language of Greenland. All other things being equal, a Bayesian learner will favor the model with the highest probability given the data available. In this case, both abstract rule-ordering solutions and concrete surface-oriented approaches adequately account for the data. But Bayesian reasoning provides an answer as to how to weigh the trade-off between increasing the complexity of the grammar (via rule ordering) and increasing the complexity of the lexicon (via new phonemes). A Bayesian learner will prefer opaque solutions (a rule system including rule ordering) over adding new phonemes to the language, since a learner pays for a rule only once, but pays for an increase in the phoneme inventory with every lexical item.

A glottal stop is the source of one type of high tone, H1. First, §7.1 discusses evidence for the analysis that H1 comes from a glottal stop, and argues that there is sufficient phonological evidence to posit the glottal stop. It is not the case that a glottal stop is always accompanied by H1, which complicates the analysis, but such cases can be accounted for by the OCP (§6.2) and by morphological factors, discussed in §7.2. That H1 comes from a glottal stop further supports my claim that H1 spreading is leftward (§7.3). Since in some cases positing a glottal stop, along with the tones it has induced, is admittedly abstract, I do consider alternatives. §7.4 concludes, giving language internal and external evidence and argue that the lexical representations should include a glottal stop, as well as the tone it has induced.

In this chapter a well-known dilemma is presented for musical works, involving their purported abstract nature and creativity. A similar dilemma is presented for scientific theories and various ways of resolving both dilemmas are canvassed. One is to take artworks and theories to be abstract and understand the creative act in terms of the author’s situation in some abstract space. Another is to insist that both are imaginary things and that appreciation of either involves intelligent reconstruction. Such views not only involve ontological proliferation but also fail to accommodate the heuristic processes involved.

Many arguments for multiple realization begin with the claim that psychological states are computational states, and conclude the abstractness of computational states assures their multiple realizability. However, in many cases where a cognitive scientist offers a computational description of a cognitive capacity, on offer is merely a computational gloss that carries with it no commitment to the existence of an internal psychological organization that actually performs computations. Similarly, that the abstractness of computational descriptions entails the multiple realizability of psychological states runs into difficulty. Abstractness is a property of descriptions, not of the processes described. Hence, the abstract character of computational descriptions does little to support the claim that the processes they describe might be multiply realizable. Furthermore, one may insist that computational descriptions of psychological processes succeed because the processes themselves are computational, but this response neglects decades of research that challenges the computational nature of psychological processing.