298 research outputs found
Sonority and Constraint Interaction: the Acquisition of Complex Onsets by Spanish Learners of English
Tradicionalmente se ha prestado abundante atenciĂłn a la adquisiciĂłn de la estructura silábica de segundas lenguas. Las investigaciones se han centrado en dos temas principales dentro de esta área: por un lado, la fuente de los errores (Âżuniversal o causada por la fonologĂa de la L1?); por otro lado, los factores que determinan la elecciĂłn de una estrategia u otra para ÂżrepararÂż estructuras silábicas ilĂcitas. En nuestra investigaciĂłn discutimos el concepto clave de ÂżsonoridadÂż a la luz de los datos obtenidos de 5 aprendices de inglĂ©s hispanohablantes. Extraemos diferentes cabezas silábicas complejas, llegando a dos conclusiones principales. En primer lugar, que las secuencias de Âżs + oclusiva- les resultaban más difĂciles que las de Âżs + lĂquida- a pesar de que ninguna de ellas está permitida por la fonologĂa del español. Interpretamos este hecho en tĂ©rminos de TeorĂa de la Optimidad, discutiendo la naturaleza de dos diferentes restricciones de sonoridad (SONORITY y O SON) y justificando el comportamiento lingĂĽĂstico de nuestros aprendices en su relaciĂłn con la explicaciĂłn del aprendizaje en TeorĂa de la Optimidad. En segundo lugar, contradecimos las afirmaciones de Hancin-Bhatt & Bhatt (1997) en el sentido de que las secuencias de Âż oclusiva + semivocal- son un problema para los aprendices de inglĂ©s hispanohablantes. Sugerimos que la polĂ©mica referente a las cabezas silábicas de Âż consonante + semivocal- y sus implicaciones para distintos modelos de sonoridad (Broselow & Finer 1991; Eckman & Iverson 1993) no puede arrojar resultados Ăştiles a causa de la inestabilidad en el comportamiento silábico de las semivocales. Finalmente se discuten posibles alternativas al concepto tradicional de sonoridad y sus implicaciones para la investigaciĂłn de la fonologĂa de la L2
Learning Local Phonological Processes
We present a learning algorithm for local phonological processes that relies on a restriction on the expressive power needed to compute phonological patterns that apply locally. Representing phonological processes as a functional mapping from an input to output form (an assumption compatible with either the SPE or OT formalism), the learner assumes the target process can be described with the functional counterpart to the Strictly Local (McNaughton and Papert 1971, Rogers and Pullum 2011) formal languages. Given a data set of input-output string pairs, the learner applies the two-stage grammatical induction procedure of 1) constructing a prefix tree representation of the input and 2) generalizing the pattern to words not found in the data set by merging states (Garcia and Vidal 1990, Oncina et al. 1993, Heinz 2007, 2009, de la Higuera 2010). The learner’s criterion for state merging enforces a locality requirement on the kind of function it can converge to and thereby directly reflects its own hypothesis space. We demonstrate with the example of German final devoicing, using a corpus of string pairs derived from the CELEX2 lemma corpus. The implications of our results include a proposal for how humans generalize to learn phonological patterns and a consequent explanation for why local phonological patterns have this property
Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception
We show that loanword adaptation can be understood entirely in terms of phonological and phonetic comprehension and production mechanisms in the first language. We provide explicit accounts of several loanword adaptation phenomena (in Korean) in terms of an Optimality-Theoretic grammar model with the same three levels of representation that are needed to describe L1 phonology: the underlying form, the phonological surface form, and the auditory-phonetic form. The model is bidirectional, i.e., the same constraints and rankings are used by the listener and by the speaker. These constraints and rankings are the same for L1 processing and loanword adaptation
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Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans
We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma & Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies
Optimal coding and the origins of Zipfian laws
The problem of compression in standard information theory consists of
assigning codes as short as possible to numbers. Here we consider the problem
of optimal coding -- under an arbitrary coding scheme -- and show that it
predicts Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely a tendency in natural languages for
more frequent words to be shorter. We apply this result to investigate optimal
coding also under so-called non-singular coding, a scheme where unique
segmentation is not warranted but codes stand for a distinct number. Optimal
non-singular coding predicts that the length of a word should grow
approximately as the logarithm of its frequency rank, which is again consistent
with Zipf's law of abbreviation. Optimal non-singular coding in combination
with the maximum entropy principle also predicts Zipf's rank-frequency
distribution. Furthermore, our findings on optimal non-singular coding
challenge common beliefs about random typing. It turns out that random typing
is in fact an optimal coding process, in stark contrast with the common
assumption that it is detached from cost cutting considerations. Finally, we
discuss the implications of optimal coding for the construction of a compact
theory of Zipfian laws and other linguistic laws.Comment: in press in the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics; definition of
concordant pair corrected, proofs polished, references update
Aspekte der Charakterisierung phonologischer Sprachstörungen vs. verzögerter Spracherwerb bei jordanischem Arabisch sprechenden Kindern
Bader S'da SI. Issues in the characterisation of phonological speech impairment vs. delayed acquisition in Jordanian Arabic-Speaking children. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2010.Eine Studie des Spracherwerbs des jordanischen Arabisch bei jungen Muttersprachlern.A study with children speaking or acquiring Jordanian Arabic with or without phonological impairments
Incidentals that build fluency: Optimal word processing and its implications for vocabulary acquisition.
Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139797/1/OptimalWordProcessor.pd
Book reviews
Daniel Currie Hall: The role and representation of contrast in phonological theory. University of Toronto, Toronto, 2007, 277 pp. ; David Odden: Introducing phonology.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, 348 pp
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Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, and Exceptions
This dissertation explores new perspectives in phonological hidden structure learning (inferring structure not present in the speech signal that is necessary for phonological analysis; Tesar 1998, Jarosz 2013a, Boersma and Pater 2016), and extends this type of learning towards the domain of phonological features, towards derivations in Stratal OT (BermĂşdez-Otero 1999), and towards exceptionality indices in probabilistic OT. Two more specific themes also come out: the possibility of inducing instead of pre-specifying the space of possible hidden structures, and the importance of cues in the data for triggering the use of hidden structure. In chapters 2 and 4, phonological features and exception groupings are induced by an unsupervised procedure that finds units not explicitly given to the learner. In chapters 2 and 3, there is an effect of non-specification or underspecification on the hidden level whenever the data does not give enough cues for that hidden level to be used. When features are hidden structure (chapter 2), they are only used for patterns that generalize across multiple segments. When intermediate derivational levels are hidden structure (chapter 3), the hidden structure necessary for opaque interactions is found more often when additional cues for the stratal affiliation of the opaque process are present in the data.
Chapter 1 motivates and explains the central questions in this dissertation. Chapter 2 shows that phonological features can be induced from groupings of segments (which is motivated by phonetic non-transparency of feature assignment, see, e.g., Anderson 1981), and that patterns that do not generalize across segments are formulated in terms of segments in such a model. Chapter 3 implements a version of Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 1999), and confirms Kiparsky’s (2000) hypothesis that evidence for an opaque process’ stratal affiliation makes it easier to learn an opaque interaction, even when opaque interactions are more difficult to learn than their transparent counterparts. Chapter 4 proposes a probabilistic (instead of non-probabilistic; e.g. Pater 2010) learner for lexically indexed constraints (Pater 2000) in Expectation Driven Learning (Jarosz submitted), and demonstrates its effectiveness on Dutch stress (van der Hulst 1984, Kager 1989, Nouveau 1994, van Oostendorp 1997)
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