The Optimal Initial State

2 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. 3 The INITIAL STATE of a child's phonology has been much discussed in the Optimality Theory literature. Within this theory, phonology is taken to consist of universal sets of MARKEDNESS CONSTRAINTS, which specify which features, patterns, or structures are typically preferred by human languages, and FAITHFULNESS CONSTRAINTS, which specify which features, patterns, or structures of the "input" (presumed underlying representations of words) are preferentially preserved in production universally and in specific languages. Faithfulness corresponds approximately to linguistic conventionality among the speakers of a language, with contrast maintenance as its motivation. That is, words must be different enough from each other to be distinguishable.