This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Pierrehumbert, J. B. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Phonetic Diversity, Statistical Learning, and Acquisition of Phonology

Northwestern University, jbp{at}northwestern.edu

In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language acquisition. It argues that categories are initiated bottom-up from statistical modesin use of the phonetic space, and sketches how exemplar theory can be used to model the updating of categories once they are initiated. It also argues that bottom-upinitiation of categories is successful thanks to the perceptionproduction loop operating in the speech community. The behavior of this loop means that the superficial statistical properties of speech available to the infant indirectly reflect the contrastiveness and discriminability of categories in the adult grammar. The article also argues that the developing system is refined using internal feedback from type statistics over the lexicon, once the lexicon is well-developed. The application of type statistics to a system initiated with surface statistics does not cause a fundamental reorganization of the system. Instead, it exploits confluences across levels of representation which characterize human language and make bootstrapping possible.

Key Words: categorization • exemplars • phonotactics • prosody • statistical learning

Language and Speech, Vol. 46, No. 2-3, 115-154 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/00238309030460020501


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				S. Peperkamp Phonological Acquisition: Recent Attainments and New Challenges Language and Speech, June 1, 2003; 46(2-3): 87 - 113. [Abstract] [PDF]