This paper provides new evidence and analysis of gradual and U-shaped phonological learning. Using a rich longitudinal corpus from Trevor (Compton & Streeter 1977, Pater 1997b we demonstrate that some of Trevor's consonant harmony follows a statistically significant U-shaped trajectory, in contrast to the more typical S-shaped progression of his complex onsets. We then analyse these two developmental paths using an OT model of phonological acquisition (Hayes , in which the learner's variation within and across stages is the effect of stored old productions rather than a variable grammar. The decrease in Trevor's faithfulness to place of articulation due to consonant harmony is attributed to the induction of a new constraint during the course of learning. Our analysis is paired with a computational implementation, showing how competition between old forms and the current grammar allows the model to derive both S-shaped and U-shaped patterns.
*Phonological alternations often serve to modify forms so that they respect a phonotactic restriction that applies across the words of language. Although it has long been assumed that an adequate theory of phonology should capture the connection between phonotactics and alternations, there is no psycholinguistic evidence that speakers actually do use a single mechanism for them both. In this study, we used an artificial language learning experiment with adult subjects to test whether an alternation that meets a phonotactic target is easier to learn than one that does not. The results suggest that phonotactic knowledge does aid in the acquisition of alternations, and also provide a novel example of the influence of the first language on second language learning.
ObjectiveFunctional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging noninvasive technology used to study cerebral cortex activity. Being virtually silent and compatible with cochlear implants has helped establish fNIRS as an important tool when investigating auditory cortex as well as cortices involved with hearing and language processing in adults and during child development. With respect to this review article, more recently, fNIRS has also been used to investigate central auditory plasticity following hearing loss and tinnitus or phantom sound perception.MethodsHere, we review the currently available literature reporting the use of fNIRS in human studies with cochlear implants and tinnitus to measure human central auditory cortical circuits. We also provide the reader with detailed reviews of the technology and traditional recording paradigms/methods used in these auditory‐based studies.ResultsThe purpose of this review article is to summarize theoretical advancements in our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying auditory processes and their plasticity through fNIRS research of human auditory performance with cochlear implantation and plasticity that may contribute to the central percepts of tinnitus.ConclusionfNIRS is an emerging noninvasive brain imaging technology that has wide reaching application that can be applied to human studies involving cochlear implants and tinnitus.Level of EvidenceN/A
This paper provides two arguments that constraint-based grammars should not be learned by directly mirroring the frequency of constraint violation and satisfaction in the target words of a language. The first argument comes from a class of stages attested in phonological development, called Intermediate Faith (IF) stages, in which children produce marked structures only in privileged positions. Two such stages are presented and analyzed, from the literature on English and French L1 acquisition, and their learning consequences are examined. The second argument concerns the degree of restrictiveness that a learner's end-state grammar encodes, using two hypothetical interactions between learner's assumptions about hidden structure and developing constraint rankings that can trick a learner into adopting a superset grammar. These two arguments are used to support an approach called Error-Selective Learning (ESL), in which errors are learned and stored gradually, in a way that relies on violation frequency, but rankings themselves are learned in a non-gradual way (relying on the algorithms of Prince and Tesar 2004;Hayes 2004). It is also shown that violation frequencies can still cause problems regardless of a learner's method of grammatical evaluation -either ranked constraints as in Optimality Theory, or weighted constraints as in Harmonic Grammar.
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