<OT> New Posting: ROA-799

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ROA 799-0106

Learning to be insensitive to stress in Pintupi

Diana Apoussidou <d.apoussidou at uva.nl>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=799


Abstract:
It is usually taken for granted that normally developing
children acquiring one and the same language end up with
one and the same grammar (e.g. Chomsky & Halle 1968:251).
The language-acquiring child is supposed to be capable of
creating the adult grammar from the information provided
in the speech stream, despite the fact that this information
may be incomplete in terms of possible ambiguities and gaps
in the data they are exposed to (known
as the poverty of the stimulus problem; e.g. Chomsky 1986:7).
In the computer simulations of acquisition here it is shown
that final grammars of virtual learners can differ even
though they learned from the same data and have the same
output than given in the training data. This is demonstrated
by modelling word stress of Pintupi, a language spoken in
Western Australia (Hansen & Hansen 1969). The grammatical
framework is Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993);
the learning algorithms of the computer simulations are
Error Driven Constraint Demotion (Tesar 1995) and the Gradual
Learning Algorithm (Boersma 1997).

Comments: ... are welcome
Keywords: Pintupi, stress
Areas: Phonology,Computation,Learnability,Language Acquisition
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=799