A problem which arises in the theory of the error-driven ranking model of the acquisition of phonotactics is that the faithfulness constraints need to be promoted but should not be promoted too high. This paper motivates this technical problem and shows how to tune the promotion component of the re-ranking rule so as to keep the faithfulness constraints at bay. Sections 1-2 introduce the algori...

Simple Recurrent Networks (SRN) are Neural Network (connectionist) models able to process natural language. Phonotactics concerns the order of symbols in words. We continued an earlier unsuccessful trial to model the phonotactics of Dutch word corpus with SRNs. In order to overcome the previously reported obstacles, a new method for network testing was developed optimal threshold evaluation. Th...

This study investigated whether Japanese listeners learning English employ two types of lexical information (word frequency and neighborhood density) when they recognize English words. English words recorded by a native speaker of English and a native speaker of Japanese were presented to Japanese university students in a noise condition. The results of word recognition scores showed that Japan...

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 straightforwardly modeled with Optimality Theory. Specifically, t...

Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the relative frequencies of segments and sequences of segments in spoken words. Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that are phonologically similar to a given word. Despite a positive correlation between phonotactic probability and neighborhood density, nonsense words with high probability segments and sequences are responded to more quickly t...

Phonotactic knowledge is typically tested using metalinguistic wordlikeness judgment tasks. We introduce a new method for testing phonotactics, where subjects are asked to match a set of pictures of novel objects with a larger set of pseudowords, only some of which are phonotactically legal. The subjects tend to pick the pseudowords that are phonotactically legal in their language and leave the...

This paper argues that parsing and productivity are causally related, the more an affix is prone to parsing in speech perception, the more productive it is likely to be. We support this claim by demonstrating a strona relationship between junctural phonotactics and affix productivity. Affixes which tend to create phonotactic junctures which facilite parsing also tend to be more productive. We s...

This study investigates whether alternation learning is facilitated by a matching phonotactic generalization. In series of artificial grammar experiments, English learners were trained on languages evincing categorical vowel harmony alternations across morpheme boundaries. These differed in the degree within stems (disharmonic, semiharmonic, and harmonic), thus support for alternation. Results ...