Phonological Activeness Bias Effects in Language Acquisition and Language Structuring
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Carter, William. Phonological Activeness Bias Effects In Language Acquisition and Language Structuring. 2017. https://doi.org/10.17615/qja5-ky56APA
Carter, W. (2017). Phonological Activeness Bias Effects in Language Acquisition and Language Structuring. https://doi.org/10.17615/qja5-ky56Chicago
Carter, William. 2017. Phonological Activeness Bias Effects In Language Acquisition and Language Structuring. https://doi.org/10.17615/qja5-ky56- Last Modified
- February 26, 2019
- Creator
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Carter, William
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Linguistics
- Abstract
- The task of language acquisition constitutes an inductive problem in which learners must generalize numerous productive linguistic patterns with only a small subset of all potential inputs as the learning data (Chomsky, 1980; Pinker, 1979). Faced with this “poverty of the stimulus” (Chomsky, 1980), the need for inductive generalization is apparent, and previous work shows that a set of biases that reduce the set of viable generalizations to consider and facilitate choosing certain generalizations over others are required to extrapolate patterns beyond the initial learning data (Mitchell, 1990; Wilson, 2006). Therefore, the identification of domain-general and language-specific inductive biases pertaining to language acquisition is fundamental in constructing an accurate model of human language learning and has been the focus of many studies (Becker et al., 2011; Moreton, 2008; Pater & Moreton, 2012; Wilson, 2006 among others). The current project proposes the existence of one such inductive bias in the phonological domain towards acquiring pattern generalizations which make use of features that are already more phonologically active in a learner’s grammar(s). Here, phonological activeness is defined as the relative degree to which a certain feature (e.g. [voice]) is referenced in the denotations of natural classes in the phonological component of a learner’s grammar (acquired phonological patterns and phonotactic distributions). The proposed bias, which favors reimplementing features proportional to their activeness, constitutes an example of a preferential attachment process (also called a cumulative advantage or Yule process) (Price, 1976). Evidence for this phonological activeness bias is found by observing its predicted effects in language acquisition via an artificial language learning task in which 100 English monolinguals learned sound alternations triggered either by an active feature of English, [+/- front], or an inactive feature, [+/- high]. Trends suggest that English speakers were able to better learn the pattern triggered by [+/- front], supporting a bias towards acquiring patterns involving active features. This indicates that learners aren’t simply biased towards acquiring/implementing patterns motivated by L1 rules in another language as suggested in Pater & Tessier (2006), but rather that they are more primed to “notice” and then acquire novel patterns implementing features used frequently in their L1 phonology (English in this case). In addition, intra-language distributions of feature frequencies for a sample of phonological rules/phonotactic distributions closely fit the predicted frequency distributions generated by a well-known preferential attachment algorithm, the Indian Buffet Process (Griffiths & Ghahramani, 2005, 2011), suggesting that the nature of such an acquisition bias has a noticeable effect on the overall structure of language grammars, raising potential implications for language typology and evolution.
- Date of publication
- spring 2017
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- Funding: Tom and Elizabeth Long Excellence Fund for Honors
- Advisor
- Moreton, Elliott
- Degree
- Bachelor of Arts
- Academic concentration
- Linguistics
- Honors level
- Honors
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Graduation year
- 2017
- Language
- English
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