Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-26T20:00:23.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Defying the stimulus: acquisition of complex onsets in Polish*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2017

Gaja Jarosz
Gaja Jarosz*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts Amherst
*
E-mail: jarosz@linguist.umass.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Behavioural findings indicate that English, Mandarin and Korean speakers exhibit gradient sonority sequencing preferences among unattested initial clusters. While some have argued these results support an innate principle, recent modelling studies have questioned this conclusion, showing that computational models capable of inducing generalisations using abstract phonological features can detect these preferences from lexical statistics in the three languages. This paper presents a computational analysis of the development of initial clusters in Polish, which arguably presents a stronger test of these models. We show that (i) the statistics of Polish contradict the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), favouring sonority plateaus, (ii) models that succeed in the other languages do not predict SSP preferences for Polish and (iii) children nonetheless exhibit sensitivity to the SSP, favouring onset clusters with larger sonority rises.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , August 2017 , pp. 269 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

For valuable discussion on aspects of this work, I am grateful to Robert Daland, Adam Albright, Colin Wilson, John Kingston, Ewan Dunbar, Stephanie Shih and audiences at the 23rd Manchester Phonology Meeting and the 38th GLOW workshop on implications of computation and learnability for phonological theory.

References

REFERENCES

Albright, Adam (2009). Feature-based generalisation as a source of gradient acceptability. Phonology 26. 9–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albright, Adam & Hayes, Bruce (2002). Modeling English past tense intuitions with minimal generalization. In Maxwell, Mike (ed.) Proceedings of the 6th Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group on Computational Phonology. Philadelphia: Association for Computational Linguistics. 58–69.Google Scholar
Bailey, Todd M. & Hahn, Ulrike (2001). Determinants of wordlikeness: phonotactics or lexical neighborhoods? Journal of Memory and Language 44. 568–591.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bane, Max, Graff, Peter & Sonderegger, Morgan (2014). Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system. CLS 46:1. 43–58.Google Scholar
Batchelder, Eleanor Olds (2002). Bootstrapping the lexicon: a computational model of infant speech segmentation. Cognition 83. 167–206.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Becker, Michael, Ketrez, Nihan & Nevins, Andrew (2011). The surfeit of the stimulus: analytic biases filter lexical statistics in Turkish laryngeal alternations. Lg 87. 84–125.Google Scholar
Becker, Michael, Nevins, Andrew & Levine, Jonathan (2012). Asymmetries in generalizing alternations to and from initial syllables. Lg 88. 231–268.Google Scholar
Berent, Iris (2008). Are phonological representations of printed and spoken language isomorphic? Evidence from the restrictions on unattested onsets. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 34. 1288–1304.Google ScholarPubMed
Berent, Iris, Harder, Katherine & Lennertz, Tracy (2011). Phonological universals in early childhood: evidence from sonority restrictions. Language Acquisition 18. 281–293.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berent, Iris, Lennertz, Tracy, Jun, Jongho, Moreno, Miguel A. & Smolensky, Paul (2008). Language universals in human brains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105. 5321–5325.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berent, Iris, Lennertz, Tracy & Rosselli, Monica (2012). Universal linguistic pressures and their solutions: evidence from Spanish. The Mental Lexicon 7. 275–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berent, Iris, Steriade, Donca, Lennertz, Tracy & Vaknin, Vered (2007). What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions. Cognition 104. 591–630.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bethin, Christina Y. (1984). Voicing assimilation in Polish. International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 29. 17–32.Google Scholar
Bethin, Christina Y. (1987). Syllable structure and the Polish imperative desinence. The Slavic and East European Journal 31. 76–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchard, Daniel, Heinz, Jeffrey & Golinkoff, Roberta (2010). Modeling the contribution of phonotactic cues to the problem of word segmentation. Journal of Child Language 37. 487–511.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broselow, Ellen, Chen, Su-I & Wang, Chilin (1998). The emergence of the unmarked in second language phonology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20. 261–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broselow, Ellen & Finer, Daniel (1991). Parameter setting in second language phonology and syntax. Second Language Research 7. 35–59.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. (1990). The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabification. In Kingston, John & Beckman, Mary E. (eds.) Papers in laboratory phonology I: between the grammar and physics of speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 283–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coady, Jeffry A. & Aslin, Richard N. (2004). Young children's sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactics in the developing lexicon. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 89. 183–213.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coleman, John & Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (1997). Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability. In Coleman, John (ed.) Proceedings of the 3rd Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology. Somerset, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics. 49–56.Google Scholar
Daland, Robert, Hayes, Bruce, White, James, Garellek, Marc, Davis, Andrea & Norrmann, Ingrid (2011). Explaining sonority projection effects. Phonology 28. 197–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Lisa (2006). Phonology, phonetics, or frequency: influences on the production of non-native sequences. JPh 34. 104–137.Google Scholar
Demenko, Grażyna, Wypych, Mikolaj & Baranowska, Emilia (2003). Implementation of grapheme-to-phoneme rules and extended SAMPA alphabet in Polish text-to-speech synthesis. Speech and Language Technology 7. 79–97.Google Scholar
Demuth, Katherine (1995). Markedness and the development of prosodic structure. NELS 25:2. 13–25.Google Scholar
Duanmu, San (2000). The phonology of Standard Chinese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Jan & Beckman, Mary E. (2008). Some cross-linguistic evidence for modulation of implicational universals by language-specific frequency effects in phonological development. Language Learning and Development 4. 122–156.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ernestus, Mirjam & Baayen, R. Harald (2003). Predicting the unpredictable: interpreting neutralized segments in Dutch. Lg 79. 5–38.Google Scholar
Fee, Jane & Ingram, David (1982). Reduplication as a strategy of phonological development. Journal of Child Language 9. 41–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fikkert, Paula (1994). On the acquisition of prosodic structure. PhD dissertation, University of Leiden.Google Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A., Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Broe, Michael B. (2004). Similarity avoidance and the OCP. NLLT 22. 179–228.Google Scholar
Frisch, Stefan A., Large, Nathan R. & Pisoni, David B. (2000). Perception of wordlikeness: effects of segment probability and length on the processing of nonwords. Journal of Memory and Language 42. 481–496.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, Andrew & Hill, Jennifer (2006). Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gnanadesikan, Amalia (2004). Markedness and faithfulness constraints in child phonology. In Kager, René, Pater, Joe & Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 73–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gussmann, Edmund (1992). Resyllabification and delinking: the case of Polish voicing. LI 23. 29–56.Google Scholar
Haman, Ewa, Etenkowski, Bart…omiej, ńuniewska, Magdalena, Szwabe, Joanna, Dąbrowska, Ewa, Szreder, Marta & ńaziÑski, Marek (2011). Polish CDS corpus. Available (May 2017) at http://childes.talkbank.org/access/Slavic/Polish/CDS.html.Google Scholar
Harrell, Frank (2017). The rms package for R: regression modeling strategies. Available (May 2017) at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/Rrms.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1999). Phonetically driven phonology: the role of Optimality Theory and inductive grounding. In Darnell, Michael, Moravcsik, Edith, Newmeyer, Frederick, Noonan, Michael & Wheatley, Kathleen (eds.) Functionalism and formalism in linguistics. Vol. 1: General papers. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 243–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (2011). Interpreting sonority-projection experiments: the role of phonotactic modeling. In Lee, Wai-Sum & Zee, Eric (eds.) Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Hong Kong 2011. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong. 835–838.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Londe, Zsuzsa Cziráky (2006). Stochastic phonological knowledge: the case of Hungarian vowel harmony. Phonology 23. 59–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & White, James (2013). Phonological naturalness and phonotactic learning. LI 44. 45–75.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Wilson, Colin (2008). A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. LI 39. 379–440.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce, Zuraw, Kie, Siptár, Péter & Londe, Zsuzsa (2009). Natural and unnatural constraints in Hungarian vowel harmony. Lg 85. 822–863.Google Scholar
Hockett, Charles F. (1947). Peiping phonology. Journal of the American Oriental Society 67. 253–267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingram, David (1988). The acquisition of word-initial [v]. Language and Speech 31. 77–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaeger, T. Florian (2008). Categorical data analysis: away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language 59. 434–446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaeger, T. Florian (2010). Redundancy and reduction: speakers manage syntactic information density. Cognitive Psychology 61. 23–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jakobson, Roman (1968). Child language, aphasia and phonological universals. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jarosz, Gaja (2006). Rich lexicons and restrictive grammars: maximum likelihood learning in Optimality Theory. PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.Google Scholar
Jarosz, Gaja (2010). Implicational markedness and frequency in constraint-based computational models of phonological learning. Journal of Child Language 37. 565–606.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jarosz, Gaja, Calamaro, Shira & Zentz, Jason (to appear). Input frequency and the acquisition of syllable structure in Polish. Language Acquisition. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2016.1179743.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jarosz, Gaja & Johnson, J. Alex (2013). The richness of distributional cues to word boundaries in speech to young children. Language Learning and Development 9. 175–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto (1904). Lehrbuch der Phonetik. Leipzig & Berlin: Teubner.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel & Martin, James H. (2009). Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition. 2nd edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, Peter W., Luce, Paul A. & Charles-Luce, Jan (1994). Infants’ sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in the native language. Journal of Memory and Language 33. 630–645.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kager, René & Pater, Joe (2012). Phonotactics as phonology: knowledge of a complex restriction in Dutch. Phonology 29. 81–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk, Cecilia & Demuth, Katherine (2005). Asymmetries in the acquisition of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters. Journal of Child Language 32. 709–734.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lee, Yongsung (1994). Onset analysis of Korean on-glides. In Kim-Renaud, Young-Key (ed.) Theoretical issues in Korean linguistics. Stanford: CSLI. 133–156.Google Scholar
Levelt, Clara C., Schiller, Niels O. & Levelt, Willem J. (2000). The acquisition of syllable types. Language Acquisition 8. 237–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levelt, Clara C. & van de Vijver, Ruben (2004). Syllable types in cross-linguistic and developmental grammars. In Kager, René, Pater, Joe & Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 204–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ńukaszewicz, Beata (2006). Extrasyllabicity, transparency and prosodic constituency in the acquisition of Polish. Lingua 116. 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk. 2 vols. 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ & London: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mattys, Sven L. & Jusczyk, Peter W. (2001). Phonotactic cues for segmentation of fluent speech by infants. Cognition 78. 91–121.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pater, Joe & Barlow, Jessica A. (2003). Constraint conflict in cluster reduction. Journal of Child Language 30. 487–526.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul (2004). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ren, Jie, Gao, Liqun & Morgan, James L. (2010). Mandarin speakers’ knowledge of the Sonority Sequencing Principle. Paper presented at the 20th Colloquium of Generative Grammar, Barcelona.Google Scholar
Roark, Brian & Demuth, Katherine (2000). Prosodic constraints and the learner's environment: a corpus study. In Howell, S. Catherine, Fish, Sarah A. & Keith-Lucas, Thea (eds.) Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville: Cascadilla. 597–608.Google Scholar
Rubach, Jerzy & Booij, Geert (1985). A grid theory of stress in Polish. Lingua 66. 281–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubach, Jerzy & Booij, Geert (1990). Syllable structure assignment in Polish. Phonology 7. 121–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saffran, Jenny R., Aslin, Richard N. & Newport, Elissa L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274. 1926–1928.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Selkirk, Elisabeth (1984). On the major class features and syllable theory. In Aronoff, Mark & Oerhle, Richard T. (eds.) Language sound structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 107–136.Google Scholar
Sievers, Eduard (1881). Grundzüge der Phonetik, zur Einführung in das Studium der Lautlehre der indogermanischen Sprachen. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.Google Scholar
Stampe, David (1969). The acquisition of phonetic representations. CLS 5. 443–454.Google Scholar
Steriade, Donca (1982). Greek prosodies and the nature of syllabification. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Stites, Jessica, Demuth, Katherine & Kirk, Cecilia (2004). Markedness vs. frequency effects in coda acquisition. In Brugos, Alejna, Micciulla, Linnea & Smith, Christine E. (eds.) Proceedings of the 28th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville: Cascadilla. 565–576.Google Scholar
Tamási, Katalin & Berent, Iris (2014). Sensitivity to phonological universals: the case of stops and fricatives. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 44. 359–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vihman, Marilyn May (1993). Variable paths to early word production. JPh 21. 61–82.Google Scholar
Vitevitch, Michael S. & Luce, Paul A. (2004). A Web-based interface to calculate phonotactic probability for words and nonwords in English. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 36. 481–487.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vitevitch, Michael S., Luce, Paul A., Charles-Luce, Jan & Kemmerer, David (1997). Phonotactics and syllable stress: implications for the processing of spoken nonsense words. Language and Speech 40. 47–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weist, Richard M. & Witkowska-Stadnik, Katarzyna (1986). Basic relations in child language and the word order myth. International Journal of Psychology 21. 363–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weist, Richard M., Wysocka, Hanna, Witkowska-Stadnik, Katarzyna, Buczowska, Ewa & Konieczna, Emilia (1984). The defective tense hypothesis: on the emergence of tense and aspect in child Polish. Journal of Child Language 11. 347–374.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, Colin (2006). Learning phonology with substantive bias: an experimental and computational study of velar palatalization. Cognitive Science 30. 945–982.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zamuner, Tania S. (2009). Phonotactic probabilities at the onset of language development: speech production and word position. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 52. 49–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zamuner, Tania S., Gerken, LouAnn & Hammond, Michael (2005). The acquisition of phonology based on input: a closer look at the relation of cross-linguistic and child language data. Lingua 115. 1403–1426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhao, Xu & Berent, Iris (2016). Universal restrictions on syllable structure: evidence from Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 45. 795–811.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zuraw, Kie (2000). Patterned exceptions in phonology. PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Zydorowicz, Paulina (2007). Polish morphonotactics in first language acquisition. Wiener Linguistische Gazette 74. 24–44.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Jarosz supplementary material

Jarosz supplementary material 1

Download Jarosz supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 436.8 KB