Stages of Phonological Acquisition andError-Selective Learning

This paper presents an error-driven model of Optimality-Theoretic acquisition, called ErrorSelective Learning, which is both restrictive and gradual. It is restrictive in that it chooses grammars that can generate observed outputs but as few others as possible, using a version of Biased Constraint Demotion (BCD: Prince and Tesar, 2004). It is gradual, unlike a pure BCD learner, in that it requires numerous errors of the same kind to learn a new grammar. Together, these two properties provide a model that can derive many observed intermediate stages in phonological development, while still explaining how learners eventually converge on the target grammar. In this paper, I present evidence of two intermediate stages that are frequently observed in L1 acquisition (§2), and demonstrate how both can be captured with rankings that sit between the initial and final stages with respect to the position of their Markedness constraints. Section 3 introduces the notion of learning grammars from errors via the BCD algorithm, and shows how BCD learns too fast and efficiently to derive intermediate stages. I then introduce Error-Selective learning (§4), showing how this learner chooses the errors it learns from, and demonstrating how its choice of errors derives the attested intermediate stages. Section 5 provides some brief discussion, and section 6 concludes.

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