Recent experimental work indicates that by the age of ten months, infants have already learned a great deal about the phonotactics (legal sounds and sound sequences) of their language. This learning occurs before infants can utter words or apprehend most phonological alternations. I will show that this early learning stage can be modeled with Optimality Theory. Specifically, the Markedness and Faithfulness constraints can be ranked so as to characterize the phonotactics, even when no information about morphology or phonological alternations is yet available. Later on, the information acquired in infancy can help the child in coming to grips with the alternation pattern. I also propose a procedure for undoing some learning errors that are likely to occur at the earliest stages. There are two formal proposals. One is a constraint ranking algorithm, based closely on Tesar and Smolensky’s Constraint Demotion, which mimics the early, “phonotactics only” form of learning seen in infants. I illustrate the algorithm’s effectiveness by having it learn the phonotactic pattern of a simplified language modeled on Korean. The other proposal is that there are three distinct default rankings for phonological constraints: low for ordinary Faithfulness (used in learning phonotactics); low for Faithfulness to adult forms (in the child’s own production system); and high for output-to-output correspondence constraints.

Introduction 2 0.1. Licensing: by cue or by prosody 2 0.2. Phonetics in phonology: the downward arrow and alternatives 3 0.3. An example of cue licensing: retroflexion 4 0.4. Cues 6 0.5. Cue weighting 9 0.6. Cue duration 10 0.7. The descriptive system 10 0.8. Excessive variability 13 0.9. Extensions 14 0.9.1 Direct reference to cues? 14 0.9.2 Intersegmental timing 15 0.9.3 Intrasegmental timing 15 0.9.4. Variable timing 16 Part I: Against syllable-based accounts of neutralization 1.1. Lithuanian 17 1.2. The representation of neutralized voicing 21 1.3. Word domain effects in voicing neutralization 24 2. Generalizing from Lithuanian 25 2.1. Greek and Sanskrit 25 2.1.1. Sanskrit 27 2.1.2. Greek 28 2.1.3 Aspiration neutralized 29 2.2. Voicing neutralization in Polish and Russian 30 2.3. German syllabification and devoicing 38 2.3.1 The facts 38 2.3.2. Correlations between neutralization and the syllable 40 3. A second voicing neutralization pattern: before obstr

this paper we suggest some strategies for reuniting phonology and the rest of grammar in the context of a uniform constraint formalism. We explain why this is a desirable goal, and we present some conservative extensions to current practice in computational linguistics and in non-linear phonology which we believe are necessary and sufficient for achieving this goal. We begin by exploring the application of typed feature logic to phonology and propose a system of prosodic types. Next, taking HPSG as an exemplar of the grammar frameworks we have in mind, we show how the phonology attribute can be enriched, so that it can encode multi-tiered, hierarchical phonological representations. Finally, we exemplify the approach in some detail for the nonconcatenative morphology of Sierra Miwok and for schwa alternation in French. The approach taken in this paper lends itself particularly well to capturing phonological generalisations in terms of high-level prosodic constraints. 1. Phonology in Constraint-Based Grammar Classical generative phonology is couched within the same set of assumptions that dominated standard transformational grammar. Despite some claims that "derivations based on ordered rules (that is, external ordering) and incorporating intermediate structures are essential to phonology" (Bromberger & Halle, 1989:52), much recent work has tended towards a new model, frequently described in terms of constraints on well-formedness (Paradis, 1988; Goldsmith, 1993; McCarthy & Prince, 1993; Prince & Smolensky, 1993). While this work has an increasingly declarative flavour, most versions retain procedural devices for repairing representations that fail to meet certain constraints, or for constraints to override each other. This view is in marked contrast to the interpretation...

Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.* The generative paradigm of language description (Chomsky 1964, 1965, Chomsky & Halle 1968) has dominated linguistic thinking in the United States for many years. Its specific claims about the phonetic basis of linguistic analysis still provide the cornerstone of most linguistic research. Many criticisms have been raised against the phonetic claims of the Sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968), some from early on

1 Synchronic and historical explanation Evolutionary Phonology. Evolutionary Phonology seeks to derive typological generalizations from recurrent patterns of language change, themselves assumed to be rooted in perception, production, and acquisition. The goal is to eliminate UG by providing diachronic explanations for the cross-linguistic evidence that has been used to motivate it. (2) shows a schema of this program, where the arrows can be read as “explains ” and/or “constrains”. 1

this paper I re-examine the case for distinguishing language-specific phonetics from phonology, and concludes that this move is unmotivated. It is feasible to account for 4 phonetic and phonological phenomena within a unified framework, and such a model is better able to account for the many similarities between phonetics and phonology. It is appropriate to distinguish components of grammar where the representations and principles operative in each component are fundamentally distinct, thus it is uncontroversial to distinguish phonology from syntax. It is difficult to justify a distinction between phonetics and phonology on these grounds. Phonetics and phonology are not obviously distinguished by the nature of the representations involved, or in terms of the phenomena they encompass. As far as representation is concerned, most of the primitives of phonological representation remain phonetically-based in the sense that features and timing units are provided with broadly phonetic definitions. This has the peculiar consequence that sound is represented twice in grammar: Once at a coarse level of detail in the phonology, and then again at a finer grain in the phonetics. Perhaps more significant is the fact that there are also substantial similarities between many phenomena which are conventionally classified as phonetic and those which are conventionally classified as phonological, for example coarticulation is similar in many respects to assimilation. The aim of this paper is to explore the idea that these parallels are best accounted for by analyzing both `phonetic' and `phonological' phenomena within a unified framework so the similar properties of the two can be derived from the same constraints. Unifying phonetics and phonology does not imply a denial of the distinct...

The central goal of this dissertation is to investigate the roles and interaction of articulatory, perceptual, and temporal elements in the phonological component of the grammar. This inquiry extends both to the input representations that are submitted to a phonological grammar, and to the constraints in the grammar. In order to adequately account for both production data and data from language typology, two elements must be integrated into the phonological component alongside articulatory gestures: perceptual features, which play an important role in determining phonotactic patterns, and gestural coordination, which establishes whether and how adjacent gestures are related to one another. This dissertation reports three experiments on the production of word-initial consonant clusters; such clusters are an appropriate environment for investigating how perception, articulation, and coordination interact in the phonology. The first experiment is an acoustic study of the production by native English speakers of Czech-possible consonant clusters (e.g. fkale, zbano, vnodi). Results show that speakers are more

In this paper we present selected results from a study of the voicing profiles of consonants in five languages, viz. Mandarin Chinese, German, Hindi, Mexican Spanish, and Italian. We will focus here on the voicing properties of stop closures in these languages. The voicing profile is defined as the frame-by-frame voicing status of a speech sound in continuous speech. We propose statistical models that predict the probability of voicing from phone identity, neighbouring phones, and positional and prosodic factors. 1.

It has long been known that verbal roots containing homorganic consonant pairs are rare in Arabic, motivating the existence of an OCP-Place constraint (Obligatory Contour Principle on place of articulation) in the phonological grammar. We explore this constraint using an on-line lexicon of Arabic roots. The strength of the constraint is quantified by the ratio of the observed number of examples of each consonant pair to the number that would be statistically expected under random combination of phonemes. We show that the strength of the effect over all pairs is a gradient function of the similarity of the consonants in the pair. A similarity metric based on natural classes is developed, which solves the formal difficulties of contrastive underspecification theory while preserving the insight that contrastiveness plays an important role in perceived similarity. This metric is applied in an explicit model of the gradient OCP constraint, which achieves a better fit to the regularities and sub-regularities of the Arabic verbal lexicon than any prior approach. Lastly, we review evidence for the psychological reality of the constraint, for its existence in related forms in other languages, and for its cognitive/phonetic foundations in the speech processing system. We argue that the total body of evidence supports a model in which phonetic and cognitive pressures incrementally affect the lexicon, and phonotactic constraints are abstractions over the lexicon ofphonological forms.

Within and across languages the realization of consonant voicing is highly variable. This study aims to identify, and quantify, the segmental, prosodic and positional factors that have an influence on consonant voicing. A widely used acoustic measure of voicing, viz. voice onset time, is known to have disadvantages both in a cross-linguistic framework, where it fails to provide sufficient Information for certain stop consonant classifications, and across consonant classes because it is not defined for fricatives and sonorants. This study applies the voicing profile method to the analysis of voicing properties of consonants in German. The voicing profile is defined äs the frame-by-frame voicing Status of Speech sound realizations in a Speech corpus. The speech database was judiciously constructed to cover systematically all possible Speech sound combinations in German and a number of positional and prosodic contexts in which these combinations occur. The results are put in a cross-linguistic perspective by comparing the voicing profiles of Gerrnan stops to those of stops in three other languages, viz. Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Mexican Spanish. The results are also discussed in the context of the production and maintenance of voicing during speech production. The voicing profile analysis is intended to serve äs a methodology for investigating the discrepancies between the phonemic voicing specification of a speech sound and its phonetic realization in connected speech. 1.