A single stage approach to learning phonological categories: Insights from Inuktitut
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 have each in their own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on t...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:4193297 2023-05-15T16:55:35+02:00 A single stage approach to learning phonological categories: Insights from Inuktitut Dillon, Brian Dunbar, Ewan Idsardi, William 2012-11-08 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193297 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23137418 https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 en eng http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23137418 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 Article Text 2012 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 2014-10-12T01:13:27Z 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 have each in their own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them have proceeded, for the most part, independent 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. Text inuktitut PubMed Central (PMC) Cognitive Science 37 2 344 377 |
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Article Dillon, Brian Dunbar, Ewan Idsardi, William A single stage approach to learning phonological categories: Insights from Inuktitut |
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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 have each in their own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them have proceeded, for the most part, independent 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 |
Text |
author |
Dillon, Brian Dunbar, Ewan Idsardi, William |
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 |
publishDate |
2012 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193297 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23137418 https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 |
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inuktitut |
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inuktitut |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23137418 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12008 |
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 |
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377 |
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1766046581499363328 |