Interpreting Sonority-Projection Experiments: The Role of Phonotactic Modeling
نویسنده
چکیده
A variety of experiments support the existence of “sonority projection”: speakers represent severe sonority sequencing violations ([lba]) as less wellformed than modest ones ([bda]), even though neither is present in their native language. One interpretation of such findings is that the Sonority Sequencing Principle ([9]) is part of Universal Grammar. Modeling study, however, suggests that the results could be explained with more modest assumptions about UG. I use the Hayes-Wilson phonotactic learner ([6]) to show that sonority projection is possible in a system that merely attends to sonority differences and can generalize in the right way from the learning data.
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