{"title":"Elephants and Optimality Again: SA-OT accounts for pronoun resolution in child language","authors":"T. Biró","doi":"10.7282/T37D2S6C","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7282/T37D2S6C","url":null,"abstract":"Children display a surprising delay in correctly resolving pronouns, while they employ Chomsky’s binding principles correctly in production and in resolving reflexives. We account for the mistakes as performance errors that are predicted by an Optimality Theoretical model implemented using simulated annealing. Our experiments suggest three novel explanations of the facts. Additionally, the Optimality Theory-Harmony Grammar connection is also explored: the behaviour of the HG-based performance model converges to the OTmodel if the base of the exponential weights grow large.","PeriodicalId":215388,"journal":{"name":"Lot Occasional Series","volume":"198 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134125368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The perceptual development of a British-English phoneme contrast in Dutch adults","authors":"W. Heeren","doi":"10.1075/AVT.21.12HEE","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/AVT.21.12HEE","url":null,"abstract":"How does the perception of a new phoneme contrast develop? In answering this question we consider two hypotheses: i) Acquired Distinctiveness: before learning, differences between and within phoneme categories are hardly discriminable. Through training, the phoneme boundary is learnt. ii) Acquired Similarity: before learning, differences between and within phoneme categories are well discriminated. Through training, only the phoneme boundary \u0000remains discriminable. In a pretest-training-posttest design, Dutch adults learnt the British- \u0000English pseudowords thif and sif: the first consonant in thif is not a phoneme of Dutch. \u0000Between pretest and posttest with materials from one speaker, participants were trained with speech from five other speakers. This forced listeners to form abstract phoneme categories. The results show that trained listeners performed better in the posttest than control listeners. \u0000However, in general the control group, who received no training, was difficult to distinguish from the trained listeners. With respect to the research question we found that discrimination levels increased as a result of training.","PeriodicalId":215388,"journal":{"name":"Lot Occasional Series","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129673387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}