<OT> New Posting: ROA-817

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 817-0106

Testing for OO-Faithfulness in Artificial Phonological Acquisition

Anne-Michelle Tessier <tessier at linguist.umass.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=817


Abstract:
Phonological patterns often have systematic exceptions in
morphologically-derived contexts. In OT, such patterns are
often captured with constraints enforcing phonological similarity
throughout a morphological paradigm -- e.g. Output-Output
Faithfulness (Benua, 2000). In the OT learning literature,
it has been argued that phonological learners must have
an inherent bias for high-ranking OO-Faith to prevent the
acquisition of superset grammars (McCarthy, 1998; Hayes, 2004).


The current study tested for such a bias, asking whether
learners are preferentially OO-faithful at early stages
of morphological acquisition. Twelve 4-year-old children
learned the names of objects in an artificial language,
including a novel plural suffix, and then played a 'wug-test'
game (Berko, 1958). The wug-test compared participants'
production of the same coda-onset clusters in two morphological
contexts, where only one was protected by OO-faith. A pair-wise
within-subjects t-test (p < 0.01) showed that codas were
produced faithfully in fewer clusters where OO-Faith was
not relevant (56/112; 50%) than in clusters where the coda
was protected by OO-Faith (70/87; 80.4%). These initial
results support the claim that children in the process of
acquiring new marked structures prefer repairs that satisfy
OO-faith, at the expense of other markedness and faithfulness
pressures.

Comments: To appear in the proceedings of BUCLD30. Note: this version is both brief and somewhat theory-sparse.
Keywords: phonological acquisition, Output-Output Faith, paradigm uniformity, morphological acquisition, ranking biases, learnability theory, artificial language learning, wug-test;
Areas: Phonology,Morphology,Learnability,Language Acquisition
Type: Conference Proceedings Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=817