Competing models of liaison acquisition

Evidence from corpus and experimental data

Bibliographic Data

ID3050805
AuthorsAngelica Buerkin-Pontrelli, Angelica Buerkin‐pontrelli (0009-0008-2562-7797, California University of Pennsylvania), Jennifer Culbertson (0000-0002-1737-6296, California University of Pennsylvania), Géraldine Légendre (University of Edinburgh), Thierry Nazzi (0000-0002-4378-3661, University of Edinburgh)
Year2017
Volume93
Issue1
Pages189-219
Publication date2017-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lan.2017.0006
OpenAlexW2600508409
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited19

Given that nouns rarely appear in isolation in French, infants acquiring the language must often retrieve the underlying representation of vowel-initial lexical forms from liaison contexts that provide conflicting information about the initial phoneme. Given this ambiguity, how do learners represent these nouns in their lexicons, and how do these representations change as learners’ knowledge of liaison and the lexicon become more adult-like? To explore this question, we analyze the types of errors children make, in both naturalistic and elicited speech, and how these are affected by input frequency. In doing so, we evaluate two major proposals for how children’s early representations of liaison develop. The first model, couched in a constructionist framework, predicts relatively late mastery of liaison (age five or older) and heavy dependence on the contexts in which a particular noun appears in the input. The second model takes an approach to liaison development that integrates it more closely with general phonological development and predicts relatively early mastery (by age three). The results of a corpus study reveal that by age three children are correctly producing liaison in the nominal domain and that their production errors are consistent with a phonological model of liaison acquisition. An elicitation task demonstrates that three-year-olds succeed at learning and correctly apply their knowledge of liaison to new nouns following brief exposure, though their productions continue to be influenced by nouns’ input distributions. Taken together, our findings suggest that by age three children are well on their way to adult-like representations of liaison. A phonologically based model, incorporating the effect of distributional context on early errors, provides a better overall fit to the data we present

Ambiguity · Cognitive psychology · Lexicon · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Noun · Phonology · Representation (politics · Task (project management · Computer Science · Language Development and Disorders · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology

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