<OT> New Posting: ROA-552

[Rutgers Optimality Archive]

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*PLEASE NOTE*
The following is one of 13 announcements for new ROA postings that have
been submitted since the Optimal List has been reconstituted.  So, you
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ROA 552-1002

The Optimal Initial State

Shelley Velleman <velleman@comdis.umass.edu>
Marilyn Vihman <m.vihman@bangor.ac.uk>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=552


Abstract:
The ?initial state? of a child?s phonology has been much 
discussed but rarely empirically investigated within an 
Optimality Theory framework.  The most common assumption 
has been that, at the onset of word production, all 
markedness constraints strictly dominate all 
faithfulness constraints.  In this paper, the early 
phonologies of 20 children, five each learning one of 
four languages (English, French, Japanese, and Welsh), 
are analyzed for evidence of the ranking of markedness 
versus faithfulness phonotactic constraints.  Neither 
markedness nor faithfulness constraints are found to 
consistently dominate in these phonologies, suggesting 
that, at the onset of word production, exposure to the 
distributional characteristics of the ambient language 
have already had a significant impact on the child's 
phonology.  The results also provide empirical 
verification of the need for gradient constraint ranking 
during the acquisition process, and suggest that 
children may develop idiosyncratic markedness 
constraints in response to their experience of salient 
patterns in the ambient language.

Keywords: initial state, phonotactics, gradient constraint-ranking

Areas: acquisition

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=552