Constraint conflict in cluster reduction

Abstract

A B S T R A C TWhen children reduce onset clusters to singletons, a common pattern is for the least sonorous member of the adult cluster to be produced. Within OPTIMALITY THEORY (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), this pattern has been accounted for in terms of a fixed ranking of onset constraints that evaluate a segment's degree of sonority, whereby onset glides violate the highest ranked constraint, and onset stops the lowest. Not all children follow the sonority pattern, however. In this paper, we apply two fundamental principles of optimality theory to yield predictions about other children's cluster reduction patterns. The first principle is that of FACTORIAL TYPOLOGY, according to which all rankings of constraints should yield possible languages. To produce the sonority pattern, all conflicting constraints must rank beneath the onset sonority constraints. If they rank above the onset sonority constraints, these other constraints will force deviations from the sonority pattern. In this paper, we show how divergences from the sonority pattern are caused by three [*] Selections of this material were presented in talks at

The Acquisition of English and Arabic Onset Cluster: A Case Study

“…The subject chose to delete the fricative (the left edge consonant) and retain the nasal, which shows a deviation from the SSP. This production was supportive evidence of Pater and Barlow's (2003) findings. The Arabic similar sequence, on the other hand, was repaired by inserting an epenthetic vowel as in [amaja] for 'you do it' and [zama:j] for /ma:l/ 'camels' (Table 2).…”

“…Furthermore, the divergence shown in the child's production which had led to a deviation from the universal pattern was attested by Pater and Barlow (2003). Although the child's production reflected the universal scale of the preferred onset cluster in terms of the sonority of its segments to a large extent, there were cases in which his production did not reflect this universal scale.…”

“…The acquisition of consonant clusters has been the target of a large amount of research in English (Kirk and Demuth, 2005;Pater and J Barlow, 2003;Stites et al, 2004;Templin, 1957), in Dutch (Levelt et al, 2000), and in German and Spanish (Lleo and Prinz, 1996).…”

“…The decision on which consonant to retain in the clusters by German and Spanish children was dictated by the specific directionality parameters in the two languages. Pater and Barlow's (2003) analysis accounted for the divergence shown in the production of some children that would lead to deviation from what is considered a universal pattern. The universal scale of the preferred onset cluster in light of the sonority of its segments is reflected in the terms of factorial typology along with its outputs.…”

Learnability Shapes Typology: The Case of the Midpoint Pathology

“…Studies taking into account natural language data have shown that the GLA is capable of realistically modeling generalizations regarding order of acquisition and learning curves: for example, Boersma and Levelt (2000) show that a GLA learner accurately predicts the order of acquisition of syllable types in Dutch. The GLA is also able to predict that children's repair strategies in response to marked structures can change over time (McLeod et al 2001) or differ from child to child (Pater & Barlow 2003); see Magri 2012:240-41 for discussion. In addition, recent work has suggested that, with regard to certain kinds of phonotactic learning, the GLA converges on more restrictive grammars than competing alternatives (Magri 2014).…”