A Single-Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights from Inuktitut

Autor/inn/en	Dillon, Brian; Dunbar, Ewan; Idsardi, William
Titel	A Single-Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights from Inuktitut
Quelle	In: Cognitive Science, 37 (2013) 2, S.344-377 (34 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0364-0213
DOI	10.1111/cogs.12008
Schlagwörter	Phonology; Eskimo Aleut Languages; Language Acquisition; Phonetics; Phonemes; Language Research; Linguistic Input; Simulation; Acoustics; Models; Computational Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Bayesian Statistics + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Fonologie; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Phonetik; Fonetik; Fonem; Sprachforschung; Sprachbildung; Simulation program; Simulationsprogramm; Akustik; Analogiemodell; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; Psycholinguistik
Abstract	To acquire one's native phonological system, language-specific phonological categories and relationships must be extracted from the input. The acquisition of the categories and relationships has each in its own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them has proceeded, for the most part, independently of one another. We argue that this has led to the implicit view that phonological acquisition is a "two-stage" process: Phonetic categories are first acquired and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: First, the learner might mistake the phoneme-level categories for phonetic-level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic-level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic-level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability and acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using acoustic data from Inuktitut, we show that this model reliably converges on a set of phoneme-level categories and phonetic-level relations among subcategories, without making use of a lexicon. (Contains 4 figures, 4 tables, and 2 notes.) (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10