Development of articulatory, phonetic, and phonological capabilities

Menn, Lise

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511980503.009

Cited by 87 publications

(126 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Schwartz & Leonard, 1982;Schwartz, 1988). Yet as Menn (1983) pointed out, it is difficult to see how children can be "aware" of the many sounds and prosodic structures that they cannot yet produce. A simple alternative is to turn the process around: Perhaps children are "selecting" what they DO know rather than avoiding what they do not.…”

Section: The Sources Of Phonological Knowledge: Some Experimental Evimentioning

confidence: 99%

The sources of phonological knowledge: a cross-linguistic perspective

Vihman¹,

Kunnari²

2006

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Section: The Sources Of Phonological Knowledge: Some Experimental Evimentioning

confidence: 99%

The sources of phonological knowledge: a cross-linguistic perspective

Vihman¹,

Kunnari²

2006

rlv

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“…Others argue that markedness constraints are generalizations over the input that a child hears, and hence reflect input frequencies (e.g., Hayes 2004; for a similar point in other frameworks see Pierrehumbert 2003, Beckman andEdwards 2000). Yet others argue that constraints emerge as generalizations over children's own lexicons (Fikkert and Levelt 2008; see also Waterson 1971, Ferguson andFarwell 1975;Menn 1983, for similar pre-OT views). When these constraints have emerged they remain part of the child's grammar, although the ranking still may change.…”

Section: Ot: the Basic Architecturementioning

confidence: 98%

Language acquisition in optimality theory

Fikkert

Hoop

2009

Linguistics

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In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language acquisition and learning. There are many unsettled issues, however. Are the constraints innate or do they emerge during acquisition (nature-nurture)? And if they emerge, where do they come from? What is the initial state? Does the (re)ranking of constraints only involve the demotion of markedness constraints, the promotion of faithfulness constraints, or can it be achieved by both the demotion and the promotion of constraints? Another issue is whether comprehension and production are mediated by the same grammar or whether there is one grammar for comprehension and another for production. This article reviews the current state of a¤airs in language acquisition studies in OT and ends with some critical remarks and speculations on how the field is likely to develop. The concept of learning and acquisition in OT The rise of optimality theory and its consequences for acquisitionIn optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004), a grammar consists of a set of constraints on wellformedness (markedness constraints), which are violable and typically conflicting with faithfulness constraints, which govern the mapping between an input (or underlying form) and an output (the overt or surface form). Suppose we have the markedness constraint NoCoda, which bans codas, and the faithfulness constraint Max-IO, which states that input segments must have output correspondents, i.e.,

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“…) To see how constraint ranking and weighting differ, consider the example in 44) below. This normal two-by-two OT tableau can also be interpreted in a constraint weighting grammar if each 28 One other application of these re-runs is to so-called U-shaped development, where child grammars sometimes regress to what appears to be a less marked grammar after some time of having a more advanced one (see Stemberger, Bernhardt and Johnson 2001;Bleile and Tomnlin 1991;Macken and Ferguson 1983;Menn, 1976Menn, , 1983. Under this approach, regressions could be brought about by running the current Support through the MBCD algorithm and discovering that some rankings are not justified by any stored errors, prompting a return to a more restrictive grammar.…”

Section: Weighted Constraints As An Alternative Theory Of Grammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency of violation and constraint-based phonological learning

Tessier

2009

Lingua

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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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Development of articulatory, phonetic, and phonological capabilities

Cited by 87 publications

References 32 publications

The sources of phonological knowledge: a cross-linguistic perspective

The sources of phonological knowledge: a cross-linguistic perspective

Language acquisition in optimality theory

Frequency of violation and constraint-based phonological learning

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