Joe Pater
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 779267 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Joe Pater |
| NOMBRES | Joe |
| APELLIDO | Pater |
| FIRMA | PATER J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4784-3799 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 32 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 80 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1994 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Learning and generalizing stress patterns with a sequence-to-sequence neural network
We present the first application of modern neural networks to the well-studied task of learning word stress systems. We tested our adaptation of a sequence-to-sequence network on the Tesar and Smolensky (2000. Learnability in optimality theory . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) test set of 124 “languages”, showing that it acquires generalizable representations of stress patterns in a very high proportion of runs. We also show that the neural network can…
Violations of Lab-Learned Phonological Patterns Elicit a Late Positive Component
The experimental study of artificial language learning has become a widely used means of investigating the predictions of theories of language learning and representation. Although much is now known about the generalizations that learners make from various kinds of data, relatively little is known about how those representations affect speech processing. This paper presents an event-related potential (ERP) study of brain responses to violations o…
Learning Stress with Feet and Grids
This paper investigates quantity-insensitive stress learning using the MaxEnt learner of Pater and Prickett (2022) and compares the performance of the learner equipped with three different constraint sets: a foot-based constraint set and two grid-based constraint sets, one drawn directly from Gordon (2002), and one that changes the formulation of the main stress constraint to match the foot-based learner. The learner equipped with the foot-based …
Typological gaps in iambic nonfinality correlate with learning difficulty
This paper discusses gaps in stress typology that are unexpected from the perspective of a foot-based theory and shows that the patterns pose difficulties for a computationally implemented learning algorithm. The unattested patterns result from combining theoretical elements whose effects are generally well-attested, including iambic footing, nonfinality, word edge alignment and a foot binarity requirement. The patterns can be found amongst the 1…
Learning Repetition, but not Syllable Reversal
Reduplication is common, but analogous reversal processes are rare, even though reversal, which involves nested rather than crossed dependencies, is less complex on the Chomsky hierarchy. We hypothesize that the explanation is that repetitions can be recognized when they match and reactivate a stored trace in short-term memory, but recognizing a reversal requires rearranging the input in working memory before attempting to match it to the stored …
French schwa and gradient cumulativity
We explore the interaction of two phonological factors that condition schwa–zero alternations in French: schwa is more likely after two consonants than a singleton; and schwa is more likely between stressed syllables than elsewhere. Using new data from a judgment study, we show that both factors play a role in schwa epenthesis and deletion, and that the two factors interact cumulatively: they have a stronger effect together than individually. Tre…
Phonological typology in Optimality Theory and Formal Language Theory
Much recent work has studied phonological typology in terms of Formal Language Theory (e.g. the Chomsky hierarchy). This paper considers whether Optimality Theory grammars might be constrained to generate only regular languages, and also whether the tools of formal language theory might be used for constructing phonological theories similar to those within Optimality Theory. It offers reasons to be optimistic about the first possibility, and scep…
Generative linguistics and neural networks at 60
The birthdate of both generative linguistics and neural networks can be taken as 1957, the year of the publication of foundational work by both Noam Chomsky and Frank Rosenblatt. This article traces the development of these two approaches to cognitive science, from their largely autonomous early development in the first thirty years, through their collision in the 1980s around the past-tense debate (Rumelhart & McClelland 1986, Pinker & Prince 19…
Substance matters
Jardine (2016) claims that tonal phonology is more formally complex than the phonology of other segmental features, in that only tonal phonology goes beyond the class of weakly deterministic maps. He then goes on to argue that this formal distinction is superior to any available treatment in Optimality Theory. This reply points out that Jardine's formal distinction conflates attested and unattested tonal patterns, which can be distinguished in Op…
Learning opacity in Stratal Maximum Entropy Grammar
Opaque phonological patterns are sometimes claimed to be difficult to learn; specific hypotheses have been advanced about the relative difficulty of particular kinds of opaque processes (Kiparsky 1971, 1973), and the kind of data that is helpful in learning an opaque pattern (Kiparsky 2000). In this paper, we present a computationally implemented learning theory for one grammatical theory of opacity, a Maximum Entropy version of Stratal OT (Bermú…
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
This handbook provides a thorough and systematic investigation of the question of how we come to know a language. Researchers from all over the world explore the leading research questions within developmental linguistics, which include: What does the newborn child bring to the task of language acquisition? What information must the child extract from her linguistic input? And how does biological maturation interact with the child’s developing li…
Does Learning Alternations Affect Phonotactic Judgments
It has long been recognized that alternations often serve to resolve violations of the phonotactic constraints of a language, and it has often been claimed that this entails a unified analysis. However, alternations and phonotactics do not always reflect identical constraints or processes. We provide experimental evidence that the learning of an alternation may affect phonotactic judgments.Participants were trained on one of two artificial langua…
The Acquisition of Phonological Inventories
This chapter gives a unified overview of the research on how phonological inventories are acquired in a first language. It surveys the main highlights of the literature from both a perception and a production standpoint, from both linguistics and psychology, with an eye to how we might start to square the various disagreeing sets of facts
Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy
The present chapter focuses on fluent speech segmentation abilities in early language development. We first review studies exploring the early use of major prosodic boundary cues which allow infants to cut full utterances into smaller-sized sequences like clauses or phrases. We then summarize studies showing that word segmentation abilities emerge around 8 months, and rely on infants’ processing of various bottom-up word boundary cues and top-dow…
Canadian raising with language-specific weighted constraints
The distribution of the raised variants of the Canadian English diphthongs is standardly analyzed as opaque allophony, with derivationally ordered processes of diphthong raising and of /t/ flapping. This paper provides an alternative positional contrast analysis in which the pre-flap raised diphthongs are licensed by a language-specific constraint. The basic distributional facts are captured with a weighted constraint grammar that lacks the inter…
Canadian raising with language-specific weighted constraints
The distribution of the raised variants of the Canadian English diphthongs is standardly analyzed as opaque allophony, with derivationally ordered processes of diphthong raising and of /t/-flapping. This short report provides an alternative positional contrast analysis in which the preflap raised diphthongs are licensed by a language-specific constraint. The basic distributional facts are captured with a weighted constraint grammar that lacks the…
Phonotactics as phonology
The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster whose second member is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighbourhood density. The experiment also suggests that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure:…
Structure and Substance in Artificial-phonology Learning, Part I
Artificial analogues of natural-language phonological patterns can often be learned in the lab from small amounts of training or exposure. The difficulty of a featurally-defined pattern has been hypothesized to be affected by two main factors, its formal structure (the abstract logical configuration of the defining features) and its phonetic substance (the concrete phonetic interpretation of the pattern). This paper, the first of a two-part serie…
Structure and Substance in Artificial-Phonology Learning, Part II
Artificial analogues of natural-language phonological patterns can often be learned in the lab from small amounts of training or exposure. The difficulty of a featurally-defined pattern has been hypothesized to be affected by two main factors, its formal structure (the abstract logical relationships between the defining features) and its phonetic substance (the concrete phonetic interpretation of the pattern). This paper, the second of a two-part…
Harmonic Grammar with linear programming
Harmonic Grammar is a model of linguistic constraint interaction in which well-formedness is calculated in terms of the sum of weighted constraint violations. We show how linear programming algorithms can be used to determine whether there is a weighting for a set of constraints that fits a set of linguistic data. The associated software package OT-Help provides a practical tool for studying large and complex linguistic systems in the Harmonic Gr…
Weighted Constraints in Generative Linguistics
Harmonic Grammar (HG) and Optimality Theory (OT) are closely related formal frameworks for the study of language. In both, the structure of a given language is determined by the relative strengths of a set of constraints. They differ in how these strengths are represented: as numerical weights (HG) or as ranks (OT). Weighted constraints have advantages for the construction of accounts of language learning and other cognitive processes, partly bec…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Weighted constraints and gradient restrictions on place co-occurrence in Muna and Arabic
Gradual Learning and Convergence
334-345
The Perceptual Acquisition of Phonological Contrasts
Stager and Werker (1997) show that fourteen-month-olds engaged in a word-learning task fail to respond to a switch between the minimal pair [bI] and [dI], though they do respond to a switch between [lIf] and [nim] in the same task. In this article we show that the [bI]/[dI] results extend to stimuli that respect English phonotactics ([bIn] vs. [dIn]), to a voicing contrast ([pIn] vs. [bIn]), and to voicing and place combined ([pIn] vs. [dIn]). Ou…
Weighted constraints and gradient restrictions on place co-occurrence in Muna and Arabic
Generative linguistics and neural networks at 60
The birthdate of both generative linguistics and neural networks can be taken as 1957, the year of the publication of foundational work by both Noam Chomsky and Frank Rosenblatt. This article traces the development of these two approaches to cognitive science, from their largely autonomous early development in the first thirty years, through their collision in the 1980s around the past-tense debate (Rumelhart & McClelland 1986, Pinker & Prince 19…
Structure and Substance in Artificial-Phonology Learning, Part II
Artificial analogues of natural-language phonological patterns can often be learned in the lab from small amounts of training or exposure. The difficulty of a featurally-defined pattern has been hypothesized to be affected by two main factors, its formal structure (the abstract logical relationships between the defining features) and its phonetic substance (the concrete phonetic interpretation of the pattern). This paper, the second of a two-part…
Gradual Learning and Convergence
334-345
Structure and Substance in Artificial-phonology Learning, Part I
Artificial analogues of natural-language phonological patterns can often be learned in the lab from small amounts of training or exposure. The difficulty of a featurally-defined pattern has been hypothesized to be affected by two main factors, its formal structure (the abstract logical configuration of the defining features) and its phonetic substance (the concrete phonetic interpretation of the pattern). This paper, the first of a two-part serie…
The perceptual acquisition of Thai phonology by English speakers
This article presents a follow-up to Curtin et al.’s study of the perceptual acquisition of Thai laryngeal contrasts by native speakers of English, which found that subjects performed better on contrasts in voice than aspiration. This finding - surprising in light of earlier cross-linguistic voice onset time (VOT) research - was attributed to the fact that the task tapped lexical representations, which are unspecified for aspiration according to …
Canadian raising with language-specific weighted constraints
The distribution of the raised variants of the Canadian English diphthongs is standardly analyzed as opaque allophony, with derivationally ordered processes of diphthong raising and of /t/-flapping. This short report provides an alternative positional contrast analysis in which the preflap raised diphthongs are licensed by a language-specific constraint. The basic distributional facts are captured with a weighted constraint grammar that lacks the…
The Perceptual Acquisition of Phonological Contrasts
Stager and Werker (1997) show that fourteen-month-olds engaged in a word-learning task fail to respond to a switch between the minimal pair [bI] and [dI], though they do respond to a switch between [lIf] and [nim] in the same task. In this article we show that the [bI]/[dI] results extend to stimuli that respect English phonotactics ([bIn] vs. [dIn]), to a voicing contrast ([pIn] vs. [bIn]), and to voicing and place combined ([pIn] vs. [dIn]). Ou…
The Researcher Gave the Subject a Test about Himself
There are methodological difficulties in investigating second language (L2) learners' knowledge of reflexive binding, particularly in the case of potentially ambiguous sentences where the learner or native speaker may have a preference for one interpretation over the other. In this paper, we compare two truth-value judgment tasks, one involving stories and the other pictures. In both tasks, we provided contexts for different interpretations of po…
Research on health-related quality of life
The Researcher Gave the Subject a Test about Himself
There are methodological difficulties in investigating second language (L2) learners' knowledge of reflexive binding, particularly in the case of potentially ambiguous sentences where the learner or native speaker may have a preference for one interpretation over the other. In this paper, we compare two truth-value judgment tasks, one involving stories and the other pictures. In both tasks, we provided contexts for different interpretations of po…
Austronesian nasal substitution and other NC effects
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Non-uniformity in English secondary stress
The principles determining secondary stress placement in English display considerable non-uniformity (Prince 1993) in their application. While in some contexts a syllable will be stressed if it is heavy, or if it is stressed in the stem of a derived form, in other environments syllable weight and stem stress do not entail secondary stress. To take a relatively straightforward case, the primary stress of the stems in (1a) is preserved as a seconda…
Constraint conflict in cluster reduction
When children reduce onset clusters to singletons, a common pattern is for the least sonorous member of the adult cluster to be produced. Within OPTIMALITY THEORY (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), this pattern has been accounted for in terms of a fixed ranking of onset constraints that evaluate a segment's degree of sonority, whereby onset glides violate the highest ranked constraint, and onset stops the lowest. Not all children follow the sonority pat…
Direction of Assimilation in Child Consonant Harmony
In child language, consonants often assimilate in primary place of articulation across intervening vowels. In adult language, primary place assimilation occurs only between adjacent consonants. In both cases, the first consonant usually assimilates to the second. The standard analysis of directionality of local assimilation in Optimality Theory uses positional faithfulness to protect the second consonant. In this article, it is argued that direct…
The perceptual acquisition of Thai phonology by English speakers
This article presents a follow-up to Curtin et al.’s study of the perceptual acquisition of Thai laryngeal contrasts by native speakers of English, which found that subjects performed better on contrasts in voice than aspiration. This finding - surprising in light of earlier cross-linguistic voice onset time (VOT) research - was attributed to the fact that the task tapped lexical representations, which are unspecified for aspiration according to …
The Perceptual Acquisition of Phonological Contrasts
Stager and Werker (1997) show that fourteen-month-olds engaged in a word-learning task fail to respond to a switch between the minimal pair [bI] and [dI], though they do respond to a switch between [lIf] and [nim] in the same task. In this article we show that the [bI]/[dI] results extend to stimuli that respect English phonotactics ([bIn] vs. [dIn]), to a voicing contrast ([pIn] vs. [bIn]), and to voicing and place combined ([pIn] vs. [dIn]). Ou…
Weighted constraints and gradient restrictions on place co-occurrence in Muna and Arabic
Gradual Learning and Convergence
334-345
Weighted Constraints in Generative Linguistics
Harmonic Grammar (HG) and Optimality Theory (OT) are closely related formal frameworks for the study of language. In both, the structure of a given language is determined by the relative strengths of a set of constraints. They differ in how these strengths are represented: as numerical weights (HG) or as ranks (OT). Weighted constraints have advantages for the construction of accounts of language learning and other cognitive processes, partly bec…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Harmonic Grammar with linear programming
Harmonic Grammar is a model of linguistic constraint interaction in which well-formedness is calculated in terms of the sum of weighted constraint violations. We show how linear programming algorithms can be used to determine whether there is a weighting for a set of constraints that fits a set of linguistic data. The associated software package OT-Help provides a practical tool for studying large and complex linguistic systems in the Harmonic Gr…
Phonotactics as phonology
The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster whose second member is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighbourhood density. The experiment also suggests that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure:…
Structure and Substance in Artificial-phonology Learning, Part I
Artificial analogues of natural-language phonological patterns can often be learned in the lab from small amounts of training or exposure. The difficulty of a featurally-defined pattern has been hypothesized to be affected by two main factors, its formal structure (the abstract logical configuration of the defining features) and its phonetic substance (the concrete phonetic interpretation of the pattern). This paper, the first of a two-part serie…
Structure and Substance in Artificial-Phonology Learning, Part II
Artificial analogues of natural-language phonological patterns can often be learned in the lab from small amounts of training or exposure. The difficulty of a featurally-defined pattern has been hypothesized to be affected by two main factors, its formal structure (the abstract logical relationships between the defining features) and its phonetic substance (the concrete phonetic interpretation of the pattern). This paper, the second of a two-part…
Canadian raising with language-specific weighted constraints
The distribution of the raised variants of the Canadian English diphthongs is standardly analyzed as opaque allophony, with derivationally ordered processes of diphthong raising and of /t/ flapping. This paper provides an alternative positional contrast analysis in which the pre-flap raised diphthongs are licensed by a language-specific constraint. The basic distributional facts are captured with a weighted constraint grammar that lacks the inter…
Canadian raising with language-specific weighted constraints
The distribution of the raised variants of the Canadian English diphthongs is standardly analyzed as opaque allophony, with derivationally ordered processes of diphthong raising and of /t/-flapping. This short report provides an alternative positional contrast analysis in which the preflap raised diphthongs are licensed by a language-specific constraint. The basic distributional facts are captured with a weighted constraint grammar that lacks the…
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
This handbook provides a thorough and systematic investigation of the question of how we come to know a language. Researchers from all over the world explore the leading research questions within developmental linguistics, which include: What does the newborn child bring to the task of language acquisition? What information must the child extract from her linguistic input? And how does biological maturation interact with the child’s developing li…
Does Learning Alternations Affect Phonotactic Judgments
It has long been recognized that alternations often serve to resolve violations of the phonotactic constraints of a language, and it has often been claimed that this entails a unified analysis. However, alternations and phonotactics do not always reflect identical constraints or processes. We provide experimental evidence that the learning of an alternation may affect phonotactic judgments.Participants were trained on one of two artificial langua…
The Acquisition of Phonological Inventories
This chapter gives a unified overview of the research on how phonological inventories are acquired in a first language. It surveys the main highlights of the literature from both a perception and a production standpoint, from both linguistics and psychology, with an eye to how we might start to square the various disagreeing sets of facts
Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy
The present chapter focuses on fluent speech segmentation abilities in early language development. We first review studies exploring the early use of major prosodic boundary cues which allow infants to cut full utterances into smaller-sized sequences like clauses or phrases. We then summarize studies showing that word segmentation abilities emerge around 8 months, and rely on infants’ processing of various bottom-up word boundary cues and top-dow…
Learning opacity in Stratal Maximum Entropy Grammar
Opaque phonological patterns are sometimes claimed to be difficult to learn; specific hypotheses have been advanced about the relative difficulty of particular kinds of opaque processes (Kiparsky 1971, 1973), and the kind of data that is helpful in learning an opaque pattern (Kiparsky 2000). In this paper, we present a computationally implemented learning theory for one grammatical theory of opacity, a Maximum Entropy version of Stratal OT (Bermú…
Substance matters
Jardine (2016) claims that tonal phonology is more formally complex than the phonology of other segmental features, in that only tonal phonology goes beyond the class of weakly deterministic maps. He then goes on to argue that this formal distinction is superior to any available treatment in Optimality Theory. This reply points out that Jardine's formal distinction conflates attested and unattested tonal patterns, which can be distinguished in Op…
Phonological typology in Optimality Theory and Formal Language Theory
Much recent work has studied phonological typology in terms of Formal Language Theory (e.g. the Chomsky hierarchy). This paper considers whether Optimality Theory grammars might be constrained to generate only regular languages, and also whether the tools of formal language theory might be used for constructing phonological theories similar to those within Optimality Theory. It offers reasons to be optimistic about the first possibility, and scep…
Computer Science (28 obras) · Linguistics (26 obras) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (19 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (16 obras) · Mathematics (15 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Phonology (14 obras) · Natural language processing (13 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (11 obras)