A Probabilistic Ranking Learner for Phonotactics

1.2 The Input 1.2.1 Surface forms • Consists of surface phonetic forms to which the children may or may not have attached a meaning (so we can’t assume any sort of semantic bootstrapping, morphemic knowledge, etc). • We can’t assume knowledge of relationships among forms, and therefore we can’t assume knowledge of underlying forms. • This means positive data only—what forms exist—whereas phonotactic learning is also trying to determine what forms don’t exist.