Phonological Acquisition in Optimality Theory: The Early Stages

Recent experimental work indicates that by the age of ten months, infants have already learned a great deal about the phonotactics (legal sounds and sound sequences) of their language. This learning occurs before infants can utter words or apprehend most phonological alternations. I will show that this early learning stage can be modeled with Optimality Theory. Specifically, the Markedness and Faithfulness constraints can be ranked so as to characterize the phonotactics, even when no information about morphology or phonological alternations is yet available. Later on, the information acquired in infancy can help the child in coming to grips with the alternation pattern. I also propose a procedure for undoing some learning errors that are likely to occur at the earliest stages. There are two formal proposals. One is a constraint ranking algorithm, based closely on Tesar and Smolensky’s Constraint Demotion, which mimics the early, “phonotactics only” form of learning seen in infants. I illustrate the algorithm’s effectiveness by having it learn the phonotactic pattern of a simplified language modeled on Korean. The other proposal is that there are three distinct default rankings for phonological constraints: low for ordinary Faithfulness (used in learning phonotactics); low for Faithfulness to adult forms (in the child’s own production system); and high for output-to-output correspondence constraints. * For advice that helped to improve this paper I would like to thank Adam Albright, Sun-Ah Jun, René Kager, Patricia Keating, Alan Prince, Charles Reiss, Donca Steriade, Bruce Tesar, Bernard Tranel, Colin Wilson, and audience members at Utrecht, San Diego, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins. All are absolved from any remaining shortcomings. Prince and Tesar (1999/this volume) was composed simultaneously with, but independently from, the present paper. The authors present a proposal about phonotactic learning that is quite similar to what is proposed here. In clarifying and focusing the original version of this paper (Hayes 1999c) for the present volume I have benefited considerably from reading Prince and Tesar’s work. For a comparison of the ranking algorithms proposed in the two papers, see Appendix A. Hayes Phonological Acquisition in Optimality Theory: The Early Stages p. 2 Phonological Acquisition in Optimality Theory: The Early Stages