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In this paper, we provide quantitative evidence showing that languages spoken by many second language speakers tend to have relatively small nominal case systems or no nominal case at all. In our sample, all languages with more than 50% second language speakers had no nominal case. The negative association between the number of second language speakers and nominal case complexity generalizes to different language areas and families. As there are many studies attesting to the difficulty of acquiring morphological case in second language acquisition, this result supports the idea that languages adapt to the cognitive constraints of their speakers, as well as to the sociolinguistic niches of their speaking communities. We discuss our results with respect to sociolinguistic typology and the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis, as well as with respect to qualitative data from historical linguistics. All in all, multiple lines of evidence converge on the idea that morphosyntactic complexity is reduced by a high degree of language contact involving adult learners.

Iconicity - the correspondence between form and meaning - may help young children learn to use new words. Early-learned words are higher in iconicity than later learned words. However, it remains unclear what role iconicity may play in actual language use. Here, we ask whether iconicity relates not just to the age at which words are acquired, but also to how frequently children and adults use the words in their speech. If iconicity serves to bootstrap word learning, then we would expect that children should say highly iconic words more frequently than less iconic words, especially early in development. We would also expect adults to use iconic words more often when speaking to children than to other adults. We examined the relationship between frequency and iconicity for approximately 2000 English words. Replicating previous findings, we found that more iconic words are learned earlier. Moreover, we found that more iconic words tend to be used more by younger children, and adults use more iconic words when speaking to children than to other adults. Together, our results show that young children not only learn words rated high in iconicity earlier than words low in iconicity, but they also produce these words more frequently in conversation - a pattern that is reciprocated by adults when speaking with children. Thus, the earliest conversations of children are relatively higher in iconicity, suggesting that this iconicity scaffolds the production and comprehension of spoken language during early development.

It has been claimed that the long established neutralization of the voicing distinction in domain final position in German is phonetically incomplete. However, various studies leading to this claim have been criticized in terms of their methodology. In three production experiments and one perception experiment we address these methodological criticisms. In the first production study, we address the role of orthography. In a large scale auditory task using pseudowords, we confirm that neutralization is indeed incomplete and suggest that previous null results may simply be due to lack of statistical power. In two follow-up production studies (experiments 2 and 3), we rule out a potential confound of experiment 1, namely that the effect might be due to accommodation to the presented auditory stimuli. Here we bias the auditory stimuli against the phenomenon by manipulating the duration of the preceding vowel. While experiment 2 replicated our findings, experiment 3 failed to replicate incomplete neutralization statistically, even though we found numerical tendencies into the expected direction. Finally, in a perception study (experiment 4), we demonstrate that the subphonemic differences between final voiceless and "devoiced" stops are audible, but only barely so. Even though the present findings provide evidence for incomplete neutralization, the small effect sizes obtained further highlight the limits of investigating incomplete neutralization emphasizing the limited importance of this phenomenon for everyday speech communication. We argue that without postulating functional relevance, incomplete neutralization can be accounted for by recent models of lexical organization and is compatible with formal phonological models that entertain unpronounced projection relations.