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Constraints in Phonological Acquisition This page intentionally left blank Constraints in Phonological Acquisition This outstanding volume presents a state-of-the-art overview of linguistic research into the acquisition of phonology. Bringing together well-known researchers in the field, it focuses on constraints in phonological acquisition (as opposed to rules), and offers concrete examples of the formalisation of phonological development in terms of constraint ranking. The first two chapters situate the research in its broader context, with an introduction by the editors providing a brief general tutorial on Optimality Theory. Chapter 2 serves to highlight the history of constraints in studies of phonological development, which predates their current ascent to prominence in phonological theory. The remaining chapters address a number of partially overlapping themes: the study of child production data in terms of constraints, learnability issues, perceptual development and its relation to the development of production, and second language acquisition. rene´ kager is Associate Professor of Language Development at Utrecht University. His books include A Metrical Theory of Stress and Destressing in Dutch (1989), The Prosody-Morphology Interface (with H. van der Hulst and W. Zonneveld, Cambridge 1999) and Optimality Theory (Cambridge 1999). joe pater is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published in a number of journals including Phonology, Language Acquisition and the Journal of Child Language. wim zonneveld is Professor of Linguistics and Phonology at Utrecht University. He is the author of A Formal Theory of Exceptions in Generative Phonology (1978), Klemtoon & Metrische Fonologie (with M. Trommelen, Coutinho 1989) and Prosody–Morphology Interface (with R. Kager and H. van der Hulst, Cambridge 1999). Constraints in Phonological Acquisition Edited by Ren´e Kager, Joe Pater, and Wim Zonneveld cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521829632 © Cambridge University Press 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 isbn-13 978-0-511-16463-7 eBook (EBL) isbn-10 0-511-16463-7 eBook (EBL) isbn-13 978-0-521-82963-2 hardback isbn-10 0-521-82963-1 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents List of contributors page vii Abbreviations viii Preface ix 1. Introduction: constraints in phonological acquisition1 rene´ kager, joe pater, and wim zonneveld 2. Saving the baby: making sure that old data survive new theories 54 lise menn 3. Markedness and faithfulness constraints in child phonology 73 amalia gnanadesikan 4. Input elaboration, head faithfulness, and evidence for representation in the acquisition of left-edge clusters in West Germanic 109 heather goad and yvan rose 5. Phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory: the early stages 158 bruce hayes 6. Syllable types in cross-linguistic and developmental grammars 204 clara c. levelt and ruben van de vijver 7. Bridging the gap between receptive and productive development with minimally violable constraints 219 joe pater 8. Learning phonotactic distributions 245 alan prince and bruce tesar v vi Contents 9. Emergence of Universal Grammar in foreign word adaptations 292 shigeko shinohara 10. The initial and final states: theoretical implications and experimental explorations of Richness of the Base 321 lisa davidson, peter jusczyk, and paul smolensky 11. Child word stress competence: an experimental approach 369 wim zonneveld and dominique nouveau Index of subjects 409 Index of names 413 Contributors lisa davidson Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University amalia gnanadesikan Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst heather goad Department of Linguistics, McGill University bruce hayes Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles peter jusczyk† Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University renekager´ Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University clara c. levelt Department of General Linguistics, Leiden University lise menn Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder dominique nouveau Department of French, University of Nijmegen joe pater Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst alan prince Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University yvan rose Department of Linguistics, Memorial University of New foundland shigeko shinohara Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique paul smolensky Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University bruce tesar Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University ruben van de vijver Institut f¨ur Linguistik, University of Potsdam wim zonneveld Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University vii Abbreviations BLS Papers from the Annual General Meeting, Berkeley Linguistics Society CLS Papers from the Annual Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society IJAL International Journal of American Linguistics JASA Journal of the Acoustical Society of America JL Journal of Linguistics JPh Journal of Phonetics Lg Language LI Linguistic Inquiry NELS Papers from the Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society NLLT Natural Language and Linguistic Theory WCCFL Proceedings of the West Coast Conference of Formal Linguistics viii Preface In current linguistics the progress made in the study of language acquisition seems to be equalled in few other areas of investigation. The goal of this collec- tion of papers is to present an illustration of this progress, in phonology, in which – building on mid-twentieth-century revolutionary insights (Roman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky, and Morris Halle) – advances at the turn of the millennium are rapid, and exceptionally promising. The editors feel thrilled to present this volume, which contains contributions by internationally leading in- vestigators in the field. They provide broad (but – luckily – opinionated) surveys of general issues from which also the relatively uninitiated reader may obtain an idea of the state of the art, and others give an in-depth analysis of current issues. One will find both first and second language data represented here, discussed from theoretical and empirical angles (in fact, always in combination with one another). The roots of this collection lie in a Workshop in Phonological Acquisition Research (the ‘Third Biannual Utrecht Phonology Workshop’) organised by the editors in June 1998 at the UiL-OTS, the Research Department for Language and Speech of Utrecht University (whose financial and organi- sational support we gratefully acknowledge). The volume obtained its present shape, however, principally through the addition of papers solicited by invita- tion, and we express our gratitude to the authors for reacting to our requests in the enthusiastic and generous way they did. Invaluable editorial assistance was provided by Brigit van der Pas, to whom we are also extremely grateful. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Peter W. Jusczyk. ix 1 Introduction: constraints in phonological acquisition ReneK´ ager, Joe Pater, and Wim Zonneveld This volume presents ten studies in phonological first language acquisition, an area of research that has become one of fast-growing importance in recent years. The reason for this is not just the fruitfulness and linguistic interest of this type of study per se:itisalso the case that the more we come to know about phonological development, by the analysis of growing numbers of data collections and increasingly sophisticated experiments, the more the field has complied with the notion that acquisition research lies at the heart of the modern study of language. One of the aims of this introduction is to illustrate and discuss these developments. In line with them, the past decade in phonology in particular has witnessed an upswell of productive interaction between empirical acquisition research and theory development. With the arrival and rise of constraint-based models, in particular Prince and Smolensky’s (1993) Optimality Theory, phonological theory now provides a framework that meets the desiderata expressed more than two decades ago by Lise Menn (1980: 35–36), who is also a contributor to this volume: (1) . The child’s ‘tonguetiedness’, that overwhelming reality which Stampe and Jakobson both tried to capture with their respective formal structures, could be handled more felicitously if one represented the heavy articulatory limitations of the child by the formal device of output constraints [. .] The child’s gradual mastery of articulation then is formalized as a relaxation of those constraints. The rapid emergence of acquisition studies within Optimality Theory reflects the general suitability of constraints for the formalisation of developmental limitations, as well as the usefulness of constraint ranking for expressing the relaxation of these limitations. In this volume, we include several chapters that provide
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