A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut
Abstract To acquire one’s native phonological system, language‐specific phonological categories and relationships must be extracted from the input. The acquisition of the categories and relationships has each in its own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that researc...
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crwiley:10.1111/cogs.12008 2024-06-02T08:09:35+00:00 A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut Dillon, Brian Dunbar, Ewan Idsardi, William 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fcogs.12008 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cogs.12008 en eng Wiley http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor Cognitive Science volume 37, issue 2, page 344-377 ISSN 0364-0213 1551-6709 journal-article 2012 crwiley https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 2024-05-03T11:40:42Z Abstract To acquire one’s native phonological system, language‐specific phonological categories and relationships must be extracted from the input. The acquisition of the categories and relationships has each in its own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them has proceeded, for the most part, independently of one another. We argue that this has led to the implicit view that phonological acquisition is a “two‐stage” process: Phonetic categories are first acquired and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: First, the learner might mistake the phoneme‐level categories for phonetic‐level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic‐level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic‐level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability and acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using acoustic data from Inuktitut, we show that this model reliably converges on a set of phoneme‐level categories and phonetic‐level relations among subcategories, without making use of a lexicon. Article in Journal/Newspaper inuktitut Wiley Online Library Cognitive Science 37 2 344 377 |
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description |
Abstract To acquire one’s native phonological system, language‐specific phonological categories and relationships must be extracted from the input. The acquisition of the categories and relationships has each in its own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them has proceeded, for the most part, independently of one another. We argue that this has led to the implicit view that phonological acquisition is a “two‐stage” process: Phonetic categories are first acquired and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: First, the learner might mistake the phoneme‐level categories for phonetic‐level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic‐level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic‐level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability and acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using acoustic data from Inuktitut, we show that this model reliably converges on a set of phoneme‐level categories and phonetic‐level relations among subcategories, without making use of a lexicon. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Dillon, Brian Dunbar, Ewan Idsardi, William |
spellingShingle |
Dillon, Brian Dunbar, Ewan Idsardi, William A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut |
author_facet |
Dillon, Brian Dunbar, Ewan Idsardi, William |
author_sort |
Dillon, Brian |
title |
A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut |
title_short |
A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut |
title_full |
A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut |
title_fullStr |
A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut |
title_full_unstemmed |
A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut |
title_sort |
single‐stage approach to learning phonological categories: insights from inuktitut |
publisher |
Wiley |
publishDate |
2012 |
url |
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fcogs.12008 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cogs.12008 |
genre |
inuktitut |
genre_facet |
inuktitut |
op_source |
Cognitive Science volume 37, issue 2, page 344-377 ISSN 0364-0213 1551-6709 |
op_rights |
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 |
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Cognitive Science |
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37 |
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2 |
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344 |
op_container_end_page |
377 |
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1800755310732771328 |