ROA: | 349 |
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Title: | Dutch stress acquisition: OT and connectionist approaches |
Authors: | Marc Joanisse, Suzanne Curtin |
Comment: | 26 pages. Alternative formats available on request. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the SWOT 5 at UC San Diego (May 1999) and the Alberta Workshop on the Lexicon in Phonetics and Phonology (June 1999) |
Length: | 26 |
Abstract: | Dutch stress acquisition: OT and connectionist approaches Marc Joanisse & Suzanne Curtin University of Southern California This work investigated Dutch stress acquisition from the perspectives of OT and connectionism. The empirical data from Dutch raise two issues that are argued to present special difficulties for OT-based accounts, and which might benefit from a connectionist treatment. The first issue relates to the stagelike way in which Dutch-speaking children acquire stress (Fikkert 1994). These stages are typically explained as resulting from changes to the child's underlying grammar, which we capture in an OT account. However, this type of account fails to capture the graded and overlapping nature of stages in language acquisition. Second, like many other OT accounts, our OT model also fails to capture the quasiregular nature of Dutch stress, characterized by a large number of works with exceptional stress. A further complication is the observed tendency for irregularly stressed words to form partially consistent pools of predictability. For instance, many CVX.CVX words ending in -et and -el tend to take irregular (final) stress (van der Hulst 1984). Much of these data seems consistent with how connectionist networks learn and encode linguistic patterns. We argue that the behavior of such models might be suggestive for future directions in constraints-based accounts of language. To address this, a connectionist model was trained to produce Dutch words including stress. Analyses of the model's performance over the course of training revealed developmental patterns consistent with the empirical facts of Dutch acquisition, including stage-like stress errors and the tendency for developmental stages to overlap. In addition, the model's ability to encode stress regularities extended beyond the usual metrical accounts to include probabilistic generalizations about the influence of segmental information on stress (e.g., French-sounding word endings). These results are discussed with respect to newer developments in OT such as probabilistic constraint rankings (Boersma & Hayes 1999), and future directions for OT-type accounts of phonology. |
Type: | Paper/tech report |
Area/Keywords: | |
Article: | Version 1 |