Past Event

Join the Linguistics Reading Group for “Acquisition Sequence and Rate of Change: Learning Simulations and Data From Child Corpora” with Karen Jesney (Carleton University).

Many popular error-driven approaches to phonological learning generate predictions about sequence of acquisition that are based on two factors: the frequency of a given structure in the input, and the constraint violations incurred by that structure and its close competitors.  Less recognized is the fact that within these models the same factors also make predictions about rate of change – i.e., the extent to which a structure is acquired relatively suddenly vs. in a more gradual fashion.  This talk lays out these predictions, considers to what extent corpus data from child phonological acquisition supports these claims, and discusses the consequences of these findings for our understanding of the factors that learning models ought to incorporate.