Foot-conditioned phonotactics and prosodic constituency

Note: My dissertation has been superceded by several papers which improve on the material (I hope) and take it in different directions. I recommend reading these articles instead of the dissertation, but the thesis is available here for those who are interested.

In this dissertation I argue that hierarchical prosodic structure is needed to capture the full range of prosodically-conditioned segmental phonotactics found in natural language. I show that Huariapano, Uspanteko, and Irish all manifest foot-dependent phonological patterns that can only be insightfully analyzed by reference to abstract metrical structure. The dissertation closes with an artificial grammar study exploring how language learners acquire stress-sensitive phonotactics. The results suggest that speakers of both English and Japanese were inclined to learn a stress-conditioned vowel phonotactic in terms of foot structure rather than stress per se.