Empirical Tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm

Boersma, Paul; Hayes, Bruce

doi:10.1162/002438901554586

Cited by 637 publications

(644 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(9 reference statements)

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“…In contrast, vowels are shortened in the same segmental context when no morphological boundary intervenes, e.g., in brood (Aitken, 1981;Scobbie et al, 1999;Scobbie & Stuart-Smith, 2008). Similarly, for some accents of American English, /l/-darkening is reported to apply in canonical coda positions, but also pre-vocalically before a morphological boundary, yielding a contrast between words like hail-y and Hailey (Boersma & Hayes, 2001;Lee-Kim et al, 2013). An even more striking example, since it involves high frequency words and highly productive suffixation, involves day-s and daze in Belfast English, where the latter is pronounced with a centring diphthong, while the former has a more monophthongal quality (Harris, 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Strycharczuk

Scobbie

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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The fronting of the high-back /uː/ and /ʊ/, as currently seen in Southern British English (SBE), is a rare opportunity to study two similar sound changes at different stages of their phonetic development: /uː/-fronting is a more advanced change than /ʊ/-fronting. Since the fronting in both vowels is restricted from applying before a following final /l/ (e.g., in words like fool or pull), we can exploit the difference in the phonetic advancement of /uː/ and /ʊ/-fronting to illuminate the nature of 'fuzzy contrasts' affecting vowel+/l/ sequences in morphologically complex words. As recent results show that /uː/-fronting is partially limited in fool-ing (but not in monomorphemes like hula), we ask whether similar morphological constraints affect /ʊ/ followed by /l/ (e.g., bully vs. pull-ing). Simultaneously, we consider the question of what phonological generalization best captures the interaction between vowel fronting, /l/-darkening, and morphological structure. We present ultrasound data from 20 speakers of SBE representing two age groups. The data show that morphologically conditioned contrasts are consistent for /uː/+/l/, but variable and limited in size for /ʊ/+/l/. We relate these findings to the debate on morphology-phonetics interactions and the emergence of phonological abstraction.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Strycharczuk

Scobbie

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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“…The first learner to be considered here is the basic GLA approach (Boersma 1997, Boersma andHayes (2001). As already laid out in the introduction, this learner will not pass through an IF stage like the ones discussed in section 2, at least not unassisted.…”

Section: Frequency Of Violation and The Problem Of If Stagesmentioning

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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“…Grammar learning therefore involves a learner that, given the overt forms of a language, and a set of well-formedness constraints, searches through a space of possible grammars (i.e., possible lexicon/ranking combinations) and selects a grammar that is consistent with the overt data and meets certain additional criteria or learning-theoretic biases. The learning processes below define the core operations of the assumed model, adapted largely from models of phonotactic learning, (Boersma and Hayes, 2001), (Hayes, 2004) (Prince and Tesar, 2004), and (Tesar and Smolensky, 2000).…”

Section: Basic Assumptions Of the Learning Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using learnability as a filter on factorial typology: A new approach to Anderson and Browne's generalization

Alderete

2008

Lingua

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This article investigates the learnability filter (LF) hypothesis, according to which the set of logically possible grammars predicted by linguistic theory is reduced to a proper subset of learnable grammars by external principles of language learning. Antifaithfulness constraints (Alderete, 2001a) provide a linguistic theory that predicts the existence of circular chain shifts of two segment types, including purely phonological exchanges that are unattested cross-linguistically (Anderson and Browne, 1973). Overt data representing such systems are fed into a standard OT learning model in which learners have IOantifaithfulness constraints at their disposal. Despite this evidence and these constraints, learners always select grammars in which segmental exchanges are restricted to morphologically defined environments, consistent with typological findings. These results are shown to have implications for the nature of constraints in Optimality Theory, the correct analysis of morpho-phonological alternations, and a host of representational assumptions in phonology and morphology. #

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Empirical Tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm

Cited by 637 publications

References 13 publications

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

Frequency of violation and constraint-based phonological learning

Using learnability as a filter on factorial typology: A new approach to Anderson and Browne's generalization

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