Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T18:46:32.790Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Trajectories of faithfulness in child-specific phonology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2011

Michael Becker  and
Anne-Michelle Tessier
Michael Becker
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Anne-Michelle Tessier
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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 2004, Prince & Tesar 2004, Tessier 2007, 2009), 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.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , August 2011 , pp. 163 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Albright, Adam, Magri, Giorgio & Michaels, Jennifer (2008). Modeling doubly marked lags with a split additive model. In Chan, Harvey, Jacob, Heather & Kapia, Enkeleida (eds.) Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla. 36–47.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bat-El, Outi (2010). Harmonic domains and synchronization in typically and atypically developing Hebrew-speaking children. Ms, Tel Aviv University.Google Scholar
Bates, David & Maechler, Martin (2009). Package ‘lme4’ (Version 0.999375-32): linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. Available (April 2011) at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/lme4.pdf.Google Scholar
Berko, Jean & Brown, Roger (1960). Psycholinguistic research methods. In Mussen, Paul H. (ed.) Handbook of research methods in child development. New York: Wiley. 517–557.Google Scholar
Bernhardt, Barbara H. & Stemberger, Joseph P. (1998). Handbook of phonological development from the perspective of constraint-based nonlinear phonology. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bleile, Ken M. & Tomblim, J. Bruce (1991). Regressions in the phonological development of two children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 20. 483–499.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul (1997). How we learn variation, optionality, and probability. Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam 21. 43–58.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul (1998). Functional phonology: formalizing the interactions between articulatory and perceptual drives. PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Hayes, Bruce (2001). Empirical tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm. LI 32. 45–86.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Levelt, Clara C. (2000). Gradual constraint-ranking learning algorithm predicts acquisition order. In Clark, Eve V. (ed.) Proceedings of the 30th Child Language Research Forum. Stanford: CSLI. 229–237.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Pater, Joe (2007). Constructing constraints from language data: the case of Canadian English diphthongs. Paper presented at the 38th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, University of Ottawa.Google Scholar
Bowerman, Melissa (1982). Starting to talk worse: clues to language acquisition from children's late speech errors. In Strauss, Sidney (ed.) U-shaped behavioral growth. New York: Academic Press. 101–145.Google Scholar
Chiat, Shulamuth (1983). Why Mikey's right and my key's wrong: the significance of stress and word boundaries in a child's output system. Cognition 14. 275–300.Google Scholar
Clahsen, Harald (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: a multidisciplinary study of German inflection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22. 991–1013.Google Scholar
Compton, A. J. & Streeter, M. (1977). Child phonology: data collection and preliminary analyses. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 13. 99–109.Google Scholar
Crawley, Michael J. (2007). The R book. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Curtin, Suzanne & Zuraw, Kie (2002). Explaining constraint demotion in a developing system. In Skarabela, Barbora, Fish, Sarah & Do, Anna H.-J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla. 118–129.Google Scholar
Dinnsen, Daniel A. & Elbert, Mary (1984). On the relationship between phonology and learning. In Elbert, Mary, Dinnsen, Daniel A. & Weismer, Gary (eds.) Phonological theory and the misarticulating child. Rockville, Md.: ASHA. 59–68.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Charles A. & Farwell, Carol B. (1975). Words and sounds in early language acquisition. Lg 51. 419–439.Google Scholar
Fikkert, Paula (1994). On the acquisition of prosodic structure. PhD dissertation, University of Leiden.Google Scholar
Fikkert, Paula & Levelt, Clara C. (2008). How does Place fall into place? The lexicon and emergent constraints in children's developing phonological grammar. In Avery, Peter, Dresher, B. Elan & Rice, Keren (eds.) Contrast in phonology: theory, perception, acquisition. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 231–268.Google Scholar
Flack, Kathryn (2007). The sources of phonological markedness. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Gnanadesikan, Amalia (2004). Markedness and faithfulness constraints in child phonology. In Kager et al. (2004). 73–108.Google Scholar
Goad, Heather (1997). Consonant harmony in child language: an optimality-theoretic account. In Hannahs, S. J. & Young-Scholten, Martha (eds.) Focus on phonological acquisition. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 113–142.Google Scholar
Goad, Heather (2001). Assimilation phenomena and initial constraint ranking in early grammars. In Do, Anna H.-J., Domínguez, Laura & Johansen, Aimee (eds.) Proceedings of the 25th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla. 307–318.Google Scholar
Goldwater, Sharon & Johnson, Mark (2003). Learning OT constraint rankings using a Maximum Entropy model. In Spenador, Jennifer, Eriksson, Anders & Dahl, Östen (eds.) Proceedings of the Stockholm Workshop on Variation within Optimality Theory. Stockholm: Stockholm University. 111–120.Google Scholar
Hale, Mark & Reiss, Charles (1998). Formal and empirical arguments concerning phonological acquisition. LI 29. 656–683.Google Scholar
Hansson, Gunnar Ólafur (2001). Theoretical and typological issues in consonant harmony. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1999). Phonetically driven phonology: the role of Optimality Theory and inductive grounding. In Darnell, Michael, Moravcsik, Edith, Newmeyer, Frederick, Noonan, Michael & Wheatley, Kathleen (eds.) Functionalism and formalism in linguistics. Vol. 1: General papers. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 243–285.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (2004). Phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory: the early stages. In Kager et al. (2004). 158–203.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Wilson, Colin (2008). A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. LI 39. 379–440.Google Scholar
Ingram, David (1974). Phonological rules in young children. Journal of Child Language 1. 49–64.Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon & Rose, Yvan (2008). Positional neutralization: a case study from child language. Lg 83. 707–736.Google Scholar
Jarosz, Gaja (2006). Rich lexicons and restrictive grammars: maximum likelihood learning in Optimality Theory. PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.Google Scholar
Jarosz, Gaja (2009). Effects of lexical frequency and phonotactics on learning of morphophonological alternations. Paper presented at the workshop ‘Learning meets acquisition: the learnability of linguistic frameworks from formal and cognitive perspectives’, 31st Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, Osnabrück.Google Scholar
Jaynes, E. T. (2003). Probability theory: the logic of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jesney, Karen (2007). The locus of variation in weighted constraint grammars. Poster presented at the workshop ‘Variation, gradience and frequency in phonology’, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Kager, René, Pater, Joe & Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) (2004). Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kazazis, Kostas (1969). Possible evidence for (near-)underlying forms in the speech of one child. CLS 5. 382–388.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (2003). Syllables and moras in Arabic. In Féry, Caroline & de Vijver, Ruben van (eds.) The syllable in Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 147–182.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul & Menn, Lise (1977). On the acquisition of phonology. In Macnamara, John (ed.) Language learning and thought. New York: Academic Press. 47–78.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19. 273–309.Google Scholar
Leopold, Werner F. (1939). Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's record. Vol. 1: Vocabulary growth in the first two years. Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Leopold, Werner F. (1947). Speech development of a bilingual child: a linguist's record. Vol. 2: Sound-learning in the first two years. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Levelt, Clara C. (1994). On the acquisition of place. PhD dissertation, University of Leiden.Google Scholar
Levelt, Clara C. & van Oostendorp, Marc (2007). Feature co-occurrence constraints in L1 acquisition. In Los, Bettelou & van Koppen, Marjo (eds.) Linguistics in the Netherlands 2007. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 162–172.Google Scholar
Macken, Marlys A. & Ferguson, Charles A. (1981). Phonological universals in language acquisition. Annals of the New York Academy of Science 379. 110–129.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian (1978). The acquisition of morphophonology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Maratsos, Michael (2000). More overregularizations after all: new data and discussion on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu. Journal of Child Language 27. 183–212.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J. & Xu, Fei (1992). Overregularisations in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menn, Lise (1976). Pattern, control, and contrast in beginning speech: a case study in the development of word form and word function. PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.Google Scholar
Menn, Lise (1983). Development of articulatory, phonetic, and phonological capabilities. In Butterworth, B. (ed.) Language production. Vol. 2: Development, writing, and other language processes. London: Academic Press. 3–50.Google Scholar
Menn, Lise & Matthei, Edward (1992). The ‘two-lexicon’ account of child phonology: looking back, looking ahead. In Ferguson, Charles A., Menn, Lise & Stoel-Gammon, Carol (eds.) Phonological development: models, research, implications. Timonium, Md.: York Press. 211–247.Google Scholar
Moreton, Elliott (2004). Non-computable functions in Optimality Theory. In McCarthy, John J. (ed.) Optimality Theory in phonology: a reader. Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell. 141–163.Google Scholar
Moreton, Elliott (2010). Connecting paradigmatic and syntagmatic simplicity bias in phonotactic learning. Paper presented at MIT.Google Scholar
Moskowitz, Arlene I. (1970). The two-year-old stage in the acquisition of English phonology. Lg 46. 426–441.Google Scholar
Moskowitz, Arlene I. (1973). The acquisition of phonology and syntax: a preliminary study. In Hintikka, K. J. J., Moravcsik, J. M. E. & Suppes, P. (eds.) Approaches to natural language: Proceedings of the 1970 Stanford Workshop on Grammar and Semantics. Dordrecht & Boston: Reidel. 48–84.Google Scholar
Mudelsee, Manfred (2010). Climate time series analysis: classical statistical and bootstrap methods. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (1997a). Consequences of constraint ranking. PhD dissertation, McGill University.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (1997b). Minimal violation and phonological development. Language Acquisition 6. 201–253.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe & Barlow, Jessica A. (2003). Constraint conflict in cluster reduction. Journal of Child Language 30. 487–526.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe & Werle, Adam (2001). Typology and variation in child consonant harmony. In Féry, Caroline, Green, Antony Dubach & de Vijver, Ruben van (eds.) Proceedings of HILP 5. Potsdam: University of Potsdam. 119–139.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe & Werle, Adam (2003). Direction of assimilation in child consonant harmony. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 48. 385–408.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan (2002). Arguing Optimality. In Carpenter, Angela C., Coetzee, Andries W. & de Lacy, Paul (eds.) Papers in Optimality Theory II. Amherst: GLSA. 269–304.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul (1993). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Prince, Alan & Tesar, Bruce (2004). Learning phonotactic distributions. In Kager et al. (2004). 245–291.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team (2007). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available (April 2011) at http://www.r-project.org.Google Scholar
Rose, Yvan (2000). Headedness and prosodic licensing in the L1 acquisition of phonology. PhD dissertation, McGill University.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil V. (1973). The acquisition of phonology: a case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil V. (2010). Acquiring phonology: a cross-generational case-study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smolensky, Paul & Legendre, Géraldine (2006). The harmonic mind: from neural computation to optimality-theoretic grammar. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Stemberger, Joseph P. & Bernhardt, Barbara H. (2001). U-shaped learning in language acquisition, and restrictions on error correction. Available as ROA-472 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Stemberger, Joseph P., Bernhardt, Barbara H. & Johnson, Carolyn (2001). U-shaped learning in phonological development. Available as ROA-471 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Steyvers, Mark & Brown, Scott (2006). Prediction and change detection. In Weiss, Yair, Scholkopf, Bernhard & Platt, John (eds.) Advances in neural information processing systems. Vol. 18. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1281–1288.Google Scholar
Stoel-Gammon, Carol (1996). On the acquisition of velars in English. In Bernhardt, Barbara H., Gilbert, John & Ingram, David (eds.) Proceedings of the UBC International Conference on Phonological Acquisition. Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla. 201–214.Google Scholar
Suomi, Kari, Toivanen, Juhani & Ylitalo, Riikka (2008). Finnish sound structure. Oulu: University of Oulo.Google Scholar
Tesar, Bruce & Smolensky, Paul (2000). Learnability in Optimality Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tessier, Anne-Michelle (2007). Biases and stages in phonological acquisition. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Tessier, Anne-Michelle (2009). Frequency of violation and constraint-based phonological learning. Lingua 119. 6–38.Google Scholar
Ullrich, Angela, Stemberger, Joseph P. & Bernhardt, B. May (2008). Variability in a German-speaking child as viewed from a constraint-based nonlinear phonology perspective. Asia Pacific Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing 11. 221–238.Google Scholar
Vihman, Marilyn (1978). Consonant harmony: its scope and function in child language. In Greenberg, Joseph H., Ferguson, Charles A. & Moravcsik, Edith A. (eds.) Universals of human language. Vol. 2: Phonology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 281–334.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Becker and Tessier supplementary data

R and Perl scripts

Download Becker and Tessier supplementary data(File)
File 9.9 KB
Supplementary material: File

Becker and Tessier supplementary data

sim.harmony.TVK

Download Becker and Tessier supplementary data(File)
File 7.6 MB
Supplementary material: File

Becker and Tessier supplementary data

sim.onsets

Download Becker and Tessier supplementary data(File)
File 6.6 MB
Supplementary material: File

Becker and Tessier supplementary data

trevor_complex_onsets

Download Becker and Tessier supplementary data(File)
File 604.2 KB
Supplementary material: File

Becker and Tessier supplementary data

trevor_harmony

Download Becker and Tessier supplementary data(File)
File 1.8 MB
Supplementary material: PDF

Becker and Tessier supplementary material

Supplementary information

Download Becker and Tessier supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 54.5 KB