Phonological Acquisition: Child Language and Constraint-Based Grammar

✍ Scribed by Anne-Michelle Tessier

• Publisher: Red Globe Press
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 431
• Edition: 1st ed. 2015
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In this comprehensive introduction, Anne-Michelle Tessier examines how we acquire the sounds and sound patterns of language. Analyzing child speech patterns and their analogues among adult languages while also teaching the basics of Optimality Theory, this novel textbook will help students develop a broad grammatical understanding of phonological acquisition.

Phonological Acquisition provides
- Evidence to support theory from multiple language families, populations and data collection methods
- Connections to lexical, morphological and perceptual learning

Assuming only a basic knowledge of phonology, this textbook is aimed at students of linguistics, developmental psychology, speech pathology and communication disorders. It will also be of interest to professional psychologists, acquisition researchers, clinicians, and anyone concerned with child speech development.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
1 Background I: A Phonological Refresher
1.1 The Basics of Phonology
1.2 Phonology at and below the Segmental Level
1.3 Phonology above the Segmental Level
1.3.1 Syllables
1.3.2 Stress and Feet
1.4 Two Conceptual Issues
1.4.1 Competence vs Performance
1.4.2 Perception and Production
1.5 Further Reading
2 Background II: Infant Speech Acquisition
2.1 Methodologies: Speech Experiments with Infants
2.2 Speech Perception in the First Year of Life
2.2.1 Earliest Perception: Intonation and Prosody
2.2.2 Perception of Phonemes and Allophones
2.2.3 Perception of Phonotactics
2.3 Word Segmentation in the First Year of Life
2.4 Methodology: Vocabulary Development in the Pre-Phonological Period
2.5 The Beginnings of Speech Production
2.6 Further Reading
3 Early Phonology: The Shapes of Syllables
3.1 Preliminaries
3.1.1 When Does Phonology Begin?
3.1.2 Where Does the Child Get their Inputs?
3.2 Syllable Shape Inventories
3.3 Optimizing Syllable Shapes
3.4 More Choices in Optimization
3.4.1 A Role for Sonority
3.4.2 Thinking Through the Candidate Set
3.4.3 Other Cluster Reduction Grammars
3.4.4 More Competition: Word-Medial Clusters
3.5 Consequences and Alternatives
3.5.1 More about the Data
3.5.2 More about the Theory
3.5.2.1 More about Representations
3.5.2.2 More about Constraints
3.5.3 Comparing Frameworks: Constraints vs. Rules Part 1
3.6 Methodology: Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Studies
3.7 Further Reading
4 Early Phonology: Word Sizes and Shapes
4.1 Early Word Shapes
4.1.1 A First Look at the Data
4.1.2 A First Analysis of Target Language Stress
4.1.3 Analysing the Child’s One-Trochee Stage
4.1.4 Adding Faithfulness into the Analysis
4.1.5 Minimal Word Shapes
4.1.6 Universals, Tendencies and Early Word Shapes
4.2 Later Word Shapes
4.2.1 Bigger Words
4.2.2 Other Attempts at Bigger Words
4.3 An Alternative: Perceptual Accounts of Truncation?
4.4 Methodology: Elicitation Studies
4.5 Further Reading
5 Early Phonology: Consonants
5.1 An Ornithological Introduction to Constraint-Based Featural Phonology
5.2 Child Consonant Inventories
5.3 Constraints on Consonant Inventories
5.4 Child Consonant Repairs
5.5 Comparing Consonant Repairs in Children and Adults, and their Analysis
5.5.1 Sonorant Gliding and Liquid/Glide Alternations
5.5.2 Other Repairs for Nasals
5.5.3 Fricative Stopping
5.5.4 Repairs for Individual Fricatives
5.5.5 Velar Fronting
5.5.6 Another Process among Places of Articulation
5.6 On Alternative Explanations
5.7 Repairs for Rhotics
5.8 Methodologies: Phonological Corpora and Acquisition Data
5.9 Further Readings
6 Early Phonology: More Consonants and Phonotactics
6.1 Consonants in Codas
6.1.1 A Case Study of Polish Coda-Onset Acquisition
6.1.2 Geminates
6.1.3 Positional Allophones and Neutralizations, among Children and Adults
6.2 Interactions Between Consonants and Vowels
6.3 Consonant Harmony
6.3.1 Manner Harmonies
6.3.2 More Divergent Harmonies
6.3.3 Place Interactions in Target Languages
6.3.4 Analysing Consonant Harmony
6.4 Another Look at Misperception
6.5 Comparing Rules and Constraints Part 2
6.6 Finally Tackling Variation in Child Phonology
6.7 Further Reading
7 Lexical Influences and Interactions in Phonological Learning
7.1 What’s in a Word?
7.2 Lexical Frequency and Phonological Production
7.2.1 Connecting Input Frequency and Order of Acquisition – Implications for Grammar Use
7.3 Lexical Avoidance
7.4 Exceptions, Regressions and Fossils
7.5 Templates and the Like
7.6 Further Readings
8 Acquiring Morpho-Phonology
8.1 Introduction to the Problem
8.2 Methodology and Data: Wug Tests
8.2.1 Plural Wug Testing in Hungarian
8.2.2 Wug Testing in English: Back to Berko
8.2.3 Wug Testing in Dutch: Production, Comprehension and Frequency
8.2.4 Summarizing the Beginnings of Morpho-Phonological Acquisition
8.3 Morphological Paradigms and Phonological Uniformity
8.3.1 The Child Data
8.3.2 The Adult Data
8.3.3 An Analysis of Paradigm Uniformity
8.4 Morphological (Over)regularization and Allomorph Selection
8.4.1 A Tale of Two (Ir)regular Paradigms
8.4.2 Phonology and Analyses of Allomorphy Selection
8.5 On Finding Underlying Forms
8.5.1 The Problems and Methods
8.5.2 Learning Korean Verb-Final Alternations
8.5.3 Learning Korean Noun-Final Alternations
8.6 Further Readings
9 Children’s Bilingual Phonological Acquisition
9.1 Conceptual Issues: Bilingual and Second Language Development
9.2 Early Child Bilingual Phonology
9.2.1 Acquiring Two Phoneme Inventories
9.2.1.1 Bilingual Phonologies and Language Differentiation
9.2.2 Acquisition of Syllable Structure by Bilinguals
9.2.3 Acquisition of Word Shape by Bilinguals
9.2.4 Bilingual Acquisition of Segmental Phonology
9.2.5 A Sidenote on Bilingual Lexical Development
9.3 The Bilingual Learner and an OT Phonological Grammar
9.4 Further Reading
10 Some OT Theories of Phonological Learning
10.1 Framing the OT Learning Problem
10.2 Building an OT Error-driven Learner
10.2.1 The Logic of Re-ranking
10.2.2 Choosing an Initial State
10.2.3 Restrictiveness and the Re-ranking Algorithm
10.3 Learning Gradually
10.3.1 Why Gradual Learning Is Hard so far
10.3.2 Numerical Rankings and Gradual Learning: The GLA
10.3.3 Assessing the GLA as a Gradual Learner
10.3.4 More on Ordinal Rankings, Biases and Gradual Learning
10.4 Learning with Variation
10.4.1 Variation with Stochastic OT and the GLA
10.4.2 Variation with Ordinal OT, Stored Errors and a Dual Route
10.5 Further Reading
References
Index of Constraints
Index of Languages
Index of Terms