Everett, Caleb

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2010 - 20122
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  • Publication
    The Temporal Indeterminacy of Nasal Gestures in Karitiana
    (2010-01-01) Everett, Caleb
    In Karitiana, word-medial nasals occurring between oral vowels may surface as circum-oralized, post-oralized, or completely oralized consonants. For example, the word for ‘thing’ may surface as [ki.'dnda], [ki~.'nda], or [ki.'da]. Interestingly, this surface variation of Karitiana nasals is due to the temporal indeterminacy of nasal gestures in the language, i.e. the duration of velic aperture varies significantly across tokens. This sort of temporal indeterminacy has not been documented for any language in the literature, and similar surface variation of nasal forms in other languages has been shown to result from asynchrony between velic oscillation and oral occlusion. The author provides acoustic data that illustrate clearly the temporal indeterminacy in question. These data were recently recorded and analyzed in the field, and demonstrate conclusively that velic aperture duration is far from constant in the language. This fact contravenes expectations based on the literature, and it remains to be seen if and how it will be handled by contemporary phonological models.
  • Publication
    Numerical cognition among speakers of the Jarawara language: A pilot study and methodological implication
    (2012-05-01) Everett, Caleb
    Dixon (2004) suggests that the Jarawara language contains no native number terms. This assertion implies that Jarawara is one of the most extreme documented cases of a language with a paucity of number terms (Hammarström 2010), and helped to motivate an investigation into the numerical cognition of its speakers. Investigations among speakers of languages with limited number terminologies have proven useful to cognitive scientists interested in the language-cognition interface (see De Cruz & Pica 2008). For instance, it has been demonstrated that speakers of Pirahã, a numberless Amazonian language, face difficulties when performing basic tasks related to numerical cognition (Gordon 2004, Frank et al. 2008, C. Everett & Madora in press). In order to contrast the numerical cognition of the Jarawara with those of the Pirahã, and in so doing shed light on the interaction between anumeric language and thought, we replicated three of the basic tasks described in the aforementioned studies on Pirahã. Unlike speakers of Pirahã, the seven speakers of Jarawara tested generally performed quite well on the tasks in question. Differences between the two tribes were significant (at pdohave a native cardinal number system, contra Dixon (2004), and that this system can be used for numerosities as large as twenty. In addition to the experimental data presented, this paper includes the most extensive documentation to date of a number system in an Arawá language.