Algorithms for acquiring phonological features in Substance-Free Phonology and Emergent Feature Theory

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Most phonological theories have held the position that the phonological component of thelanguage faculty is based around the innate unit of the phonological feature, and that the acousticand/or articulatory content of features is also innate. This is a foundational assumption in rule-basedtheories such as SPE (Chomsky & Halle, 1968) and later formulations in which features are givenhierarchical structure, such as Feature Geometry (Clements, 1985), as well as constraint-basedtheories starting with Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993). However, recent approacheschallenge these assumptions, such as Substance-Free Phonology, in which the phonetic content ofinnate features is irrelevant to phonological computation, and Emergent Feature Theory, whichclaims that the content of features is acquired, rather than innate. My research interest is in thisarea, namely the extent to which phonological structures can be acquired, and how the cognitivemechanisms of acquisition itself might influence the nature of those structures.