Rapid generalization in phonotactic learning

A vowel is a vowel: generalizing newly learned phonotactic constraints to new contexts.

Adults can learn novel phonotactic constraints from brief listening experience. We investigated the representations underlying phonotactic learning by testing generalization to syllables containing new vowels. Adults heard consonant-vowel-consonant study syllables in which particular consonants were artificially restricted to the onset or coda position (e.g., /f/ is an onset, /s/ is a coda). Su...

A model of rapid phonotactic generalization

The phonotactics of a language describes the ways in which the sounds of the language combine to form possible morphemes and words. Humans can learn phonotactic patterns at the level of abstract classes, generalizing across sounds (e.g., “words can end in a voiced stop”). Moreover, they rapidly acquire these generalizations, even before they acquire soundspecific patterns. We present a probabil...

Learning Phonotactic Grammars from Surface Forms

This paper presents an unsupervised batch learning algorithm for phonotactic grammars without a priori Optimality-theoretic (OT) constraints (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004). The underlying premise is that linguistic patterns (such as phonotactic patterns) have properties which reflect properties of the learner. In particular, this paper explores one way in which a learner benefits from consid...

The Timecourse of Generalization in Phonotactic Learning

Grammars leak: Modeling how phonotactic generalizations interact within the grammar

I present evidence from Navajo and English that weaker, gradient versions of morpheme-internal phonotactic constraints, such as the ban on geminate consonants in English, hold even across prosodic word boundaries. I argue that these lexical biases are the result of a MAXIMUM EN-TROPY phonotactic learning algorithm that maximizes the probability of the learning data, but that also contains a smo...