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"I'm always amazed by those people who get up at 5 and write till 8
and then eat a peach and walk their canary and write two hours more
and then are free to collect firewood for the rest of the afternoon." [Richard Greenberg, New York Times 03/26/06] |
Anne-Michelle Tessier Assistant Professor of Linguistics University of Alberta, 4-22 Assiniboia Hall Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E7, CANADA (780) 492-5698 amtessier at ualberta dot ca |
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Research (Main Page) Teaching and Supervision Linguistic links and stuffs Personal miscellanea |
Downloadable Papers and Handouts Listed in roughly reverse chronological order Links labeled '[abstract]' jump to lower on the page Papers, posters and handouts are in PDF. NOTE: Things posted on the Rutgers Optimality Archive are currently being moved to my UofA website, since ROA is down until further notice... If something you want/need is missing feel free to email if it has not made it here yet. Comments, constructive criticisms and praise (hey, it could happen) are very welcome. If you suspect me of having done something that isn't here, feel free to email and ask. Phonological Acquisition: Child Language and Constraint-Based Grammar To appear. Advanced undergraduate/graduate textbook. Proposal accepted; to be published by Palgrave MacMillan in, say, 2013? [Table of Contents] :: Comments very welcome! Testing for OO-faithfulness in the acquisition of consonant clusters. 2012. To appear in Language Acquisition This work is old the way glaciers are old; earlier descriptions of the experimental data appear in the 2006 BUCLD paper below. [abstract] :: [paper to appear here Spring 2012] Error-driven learning in Harmonic Serialism 2012. To appear in the Proceedings of NELS42 at the University of Toronto, November 2011. [summary] :: [handout] :: [paper to appear here Spring 2012] Related work is now under review; if you'd like to see a draft feel free to email me. Modeling gradual learning in serial and parallel phonological grammars. 2011. Poster presented at Child Phonology Conference, York University, June 2011, and at MidPhon17 at UIUC. [summary] :: [poster] English Onset Cluster Repairs across Learners: Typologies with OT-Help Poster presented at ICESL Launch, UMass Amherst, April 2011. [summary] With Michael Becker. Trajectories of faithfulness in child-specific phonology. 2011. Phonology 28(2): 163-196. Previously this work was presented at the 3rd North East Computational Phonology meeting at MIT, October 2009 and the 84th LSA Meeting in Baltimore, January 2010. [abstract] :: [paper] :: [ materials and scripts] With Tamara Sorenson Duncan and Johanne Paradis. Onset Cluster Repair in Early L2 Learners' Phonologies. under review. Older versions remain available, as presented at the Child Phonology Conference in Austin, May 2009. [abstract] :: [poster]. Peer Pressure, Phonological Constraints and Contextual Slips of the Tongue. 2011. Talk presented at UMichigan January 2011, and as a poster at MOT 2011 (in honour of Glyne Piggott). Previously presented at the UNC Spring Colloquium in 2009. [abstract] :: [UMichigan handout] Short but not sweet: Markedness preferences and reversals in English hypocoristics 2010. Presented at the Canadian Linguistic Association Meeting in Ottawa, May 2010 and the 85th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Pittsburgh, Jan 2011. [abstract] :: [ CLA poster] Review of Smith, Neilson V. 2010. Acquiring Phonology: a cross-generational study 2010. Lingua 121 (2): 328-331. [preprinted version] Morphophonological Acquisition. 2010. Chapter to appear in Handbook of Developmental Linguistics, edited by Joe Pater, Jeffrey Lidz and William Snyder. [introduction] :: [to see a copy of the chapter, email me] Review of Daniel A. Dinnsen and Judith A. Gierut (eds) 2008. Optimality Theory, Phonological Acquisition and Disorders. London, UK: Equinox. 2010. Language 86(3): 716-720. [submitted version] UseListedError: a grammatical account of lexical exceptions in phonological acquisition. 2009/2012. NOW: In S. Lima, K. Mullins and B. Smith (eds). Proceedings of NELS39 vol. 2 pp. 813-827. [abstract] :: [ NELS39 proceedings paper ] With Karen Jesney. Biases in Harmonic Grammar: the road to restrictive learning. 2011. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29(1): 251-290. [abstract] :: [paper] A rather earlier, somewhat sub-optimal version appeared in University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers volume 36. Frequency of Violation and Constraint-based Phonological Learning. 2009. Lingua 119 (1): 6-38. [abstract] :: [preprint paper] With Karen Jesney. Gradual learning and faithfulness: consequences of ranked vs. weighted constraints. 2008. In M. Abdurrahman, A. Schardl and M. Walkow (eds.) Proceedings of NELS38. [abstract] :: [ NELS38 proceedings paper ] With Marnie Krauss. Learning phonological regularities across modalities. 2008. Presented at LSA2008 in Chicago, IL. [abstract] :: [LSA handout ] Biases and Stages in Phonological Acquisition. 2007. Ph.D. dissertation, Umass Amherst. [abstract] :: [filed version] :: [2008 book, published by VDM: generally improved, but minus the last chapter.] Note: much of my dissertation is distilled in the Lingua 2009 paper above, and most of it is in the sum of the next four works below. Positional Faith and the theory of intermediate stages in phonological development. 2006. Poster presented at BUCLD31. [abstract] :: [BUCLD31 poster] Stages of phonological acquisition and Error-Selective Learning. 2006. In XX the proceedings of WCCFL25. [abstract] :: [WCCFL handout] :: [WCCFL25 proceedings paper] This work was also presented at the 2006 MOT workshop at U of Toronto, and at the Brown/Umass workshop, April 2006. Learning Stringency Relations and the Contexts of Faithfulness. 2006. Presented at LSA2006 in Albuquerque, NM. [abstract] :: [ LSA2006 handout ] Testing for OO-Faithfulness in Artificial Phonological Acquisition. 2006. In XX the proceedings of BUCLD30. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. [abstract] :: [BUCLD30 proceedings paper] :: [ a much improved version of this experiment to appear in Language Acquisition Spring 2012.]
Input "Clusters" and Contrast Preservation in OT. 2004.
Rutgers Optimality Archive
Abstracts and Summaries Testing for OO-faithfulness in the acquisition of consonant clusters This paper provides experimental evidence for the claim in Hayes (2004) and McCarthy (1998) that language learners are biased to assume that morphological paradigms should be phonologically-uniform – that is, that derived words should retain all the phonological properties of their bases. The evidence comes from an artificial language word-learning paradigm, in which children learned novel objects names such as wutch and a plural suffix –del in an alien language, and then were asked to produce alien words with difficult coda-onset clusters, some of which straddled the singular + del suffix boundary. The results suggest that 4-year-olds who are acquiring novel consonant clusters are preferentially faithful to the base segments in a derived word, e.g. wutch in plural wutchdel. The paper interprets these results from the perspective of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004; Tesar & Smolensky 2000), using Output- Output Faithfulness constraints (Benua 2000) to understand the asymmetries in the observed phonologies of derived and underived test items. :: [paper to appear here Spring 2012] back to top Error-Driven Learning in Harmonic Serialism This talk investigates the learnability of Harmonic Serialism (HS: Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004: 79; McCarthy 2000 et seq.). Harmonic Serialism has achieved considerable success in capturing typological generalizations with surprisingly limited pathologies (e.g. McCarthy 2008ab, Pruitt 2010), but the acquisition of HS grammars is just beginning to receive formal attention. This work demonstrates that a restrictive error-driven algorithm for learning OT grammars (as in Prince and Tesar 2004 or Hayes 2004) can in principle be modified to acquire HS grammars -- but with complications, of the form of ‘hidden’ rankings among markedness constraints. The talk illustrates hidden rankings and their learning challenges, and offers an initial attempt to modify error-driven learning methods to discover hidden rankings. In part, the approach is to capitalize on HS's quite finite candidate set, looking for inputs that are similar to observed forms and which might therefore shed light on unattested mappings. [handout] back to top Modeling gradual learning in serial and parallel phonological grammars What kinds of variation occur during children's gradual mastery of a sound pattern? Some current phonotactic learning theories make different predictions about longitudinal variation, based in part on how 'global' or 'local' the data is in each error. Using a newly-published corpus (Smith, 2010) this poster argues that children's productions support the local learning approach and interprets this result as evidence for a serial phonological grammar. :: [poster] back to top English Onset Cluster Repairs across Learners: Typologies with OT-Help This project-in-progress is studying the single and multiple ways that learners repair consonant clusters, including recent data from young L2 English learners, and using OT Help to first derive the repair typology and then consider how to capture multiple repairs. back to top Peer Pressure, Phonological Constraints and Contextual Slips of the Tongue This talk is about the connections between two sound-pattern phenomena: (1) long-distance consonant harmonies, now known to have a fairly wide typology (Hansson 2001, Rose and Walker 2004) and (2) speech errors in which consonants swap or overwrite at a distance (such as mispronouncing 'session' as 'shession'). These two phenomena have a lot (but not everything) in common, and they may help us shed light on issues such as the competence/performance distinction(s) in phonology. The first half of my talk proposes that the grammatical mechanisms that drive consonant harmonies could also be used to cause errors, and sketches how existing constraints and learning assumptions could make this work. This approach is in some sense directly opposed to a different hypothesis -- that in fact speech errors cause consonant harmonies, via phonologization (see esp. Hansson 2001b.) Thus, the second half of my talk begins to tease apart these two causal accounts on some empirical grounds. I find some initial support for the proposal made here, but more importantly I argue that one missing piece of evidence in such a debate will come from more systematic study of children's phonological speech errors. :: [UNC handout] back to top Short but not sweet: Markedness preferences and reversals in English hypocoristics This paper reports two asymmetries in the attested and preferred forms of English first-name truncations, e.g. Peter ? Pete, in data gathered via dictionary searches and a questionnaire ratings study. First, monosyllabic truncations were preferred overall, overwhelmingly due to men?s monosyllables being preferred over bisyllables, and this men?s preference held across pair-wise item comparisons. Second, men?s monosyllabic truncations decreased in acceptability as coda sonority rose, reversing the cross-linguistic preference for sonorous codas, while women?s nicknames showed no such sonority pressure. The analysis provided uses two input truncation morphemes and grammatical OT competition between nickname candidates and the null parse. :: [ CLA poster] back to top Morphophonological Acquisition (Book Chapter) Morphophonology describes the sound patterns of a language that interact with its lexicon of morphemes: how its roots, stems, affixes, compounds etc. are affected phonologically when combined to create words, and also how morphological processes and generalizations rely on phonology in their application. The basic facts of morphophonology come from alternations: multiple surface forms that share semantic content yet differ in their phonological realizations. The extent to which alternations can simply be read off a language?s phonology varies widely: some morphemes interact with phonology very transparently, so that when combined they alternate so as to obey exactly the same phonological regularities as monomorphemic words, while other morphological patterns are exceptions to various aspects of ?simplex? word phonology. In the latter case, the role of phonology in characterizing a morphological alternation can be complete, negligible or somewhere inbetween ? this chapter will be concerned only with those morphological alternations that make at least some crucial reference to sound patterns. The chapter begins by introducing a small but representative range of morphophonological data, with an eye to rule-base and constraint-based accounts of phonology and their interactions with morphology. Second it exemplifies some empirical observations about the nature and stages of morphophonological acquisition, tying them to related proposals about how morphophonology is acquired. Finally it discusses the methodologies and results of experimental studies of morphophonological acquisition. :: [to see a copy of the chapter, please email me.] back to top Trajectories of faithfulness in child-specific phonology This paper analyzes two non-target processes in child phonology: the steady development of faithfulness to complex onsets, contrasted with the U-shaped progress of consonant harmony. We connect this difference to the typology of attested natural languages, and we offer a computational model that generates these patterns by relying on both stored errors and the availability of constraint induction. This learner has two competing sources for productions: previous forms, stored as slowly-decaying errors, and the current grammar?s outputs. Competition causes a gradual increase in faithfulness unless a newly-added markedness constraint, e.g. Agree(MajorPlace), creates a U-shaped trajectory. :: [paper] :: [ materials and scripts] back to top Onset Cluster Repair in Early L2 Learners' Phonologies This study examines the phonological development of children who are learning English as a second language (ESL). We focus on spontaneous speech samples from four children aged 5;04-5;11, from Chinese and South Asian language backgrounds, each with less than a year of exposure to English. Both South Asian-speaking children?s preferred repair for English word-initial consonant clusters is vowel epenthesis: e.g. [p?le?] for ?play?. This result is notable because epenthesis is less common as a cluster reduction strategy in children?s L1 grammars (which typically prefer deletion), yet is very common in adult L2 English and loanword phonologies. The two Chinese-speaking children, on the other hand, produce most clusters faithfully, and deletion represents their most common repair. We demonstrate that these early L2 learners? productions can be understood via the interaction of ranked constraints which have already been motivated in the literature, and that L1 transfer plays a crucial but not exclusive role in determining the nature of early L2 learner phonologies. We conclude that early L2 learners represent an intermediate population between monolingual and adult L2 learners and are thus a unique learner group, whose study is crucial to the understanding of phonological development. :: [abstract] :: [ to see a copy of the paper, please email me.] back to top UseListedError: a grammatical account of lexical exceptions in phonological acquisition This paper attempts to provide an account for exceptionally-pronounced words in children?s developing phonologies, situated within an Optimality-Theoretic, error-driven view of phonological learning. Two kinds of exceptions are discussed here, 'fossilized' and 'precocious' forms, both of which involve a set of words that are in some way out of synch with the learner?s current stage of development (see e.g. Menn 1976, Macken and Ferguson 1983, Bleile and Tomblin 1991.) The present proposal provides a way to keep exceptional forms beyond the reach of the ?core? grammar, while still using an independently-proposed approach to gradual OT learning to progress through and beyond exceptional stages. The core of the idea is to adopt a learner that selective stores and learns from its errors (as in Tessier 2007, 2009), and to add a new kind of constraint -- 'UseListedError' -- which prefers that the learner recycle older pronunciations for stored errors rather than using the current grammar to produce them. :: [NELS 39 proceedings paper] back to top Biases in Harmonic Grammar: the road to restrictive learning In the Optimality-Theoretic learnability and acquisition literature it has been proposed that certain classes of constraints must be biased toward particular rankings (e.g., Markedness >> IO-Faithfulness; Specific IO-Faithfulness >> General IO-Faithfulness). While sometimes difficult to implement efficiently or comprehensively, these biases are necessary to explain how learners acquire the most restrictive grammar consistent with positive evidence from the target language, and how innovative patterns emerge during the course of child phonological development. This paper demonstrates that altering the mode of constraint interaction from strict ranking as in Optimality Theory to additive weighting as in Harmonic Grammar (HG) reduces the number of classes of constraints that must be distinguished by such biases. Using weighted constraints and a version of the Gradual Learning Algorithm (GLA), the only distinction needed is between Output-based constraints, which must be biased toward high weights, and Input- Output-based constraints, which must be biased toward the lowest weights possible. We implement this distinction within the HG-GLA model by assigning different initial weights and plasticity values to the two classes of constraints. This implementation suffices to ensure that restrictive grammars are learned, and also predicts the emergence of a variety of attested intermediate stages during the course of acquisition. :: [paper] back to top Frequency of Violation and Constraint-based Phonological Learning This paper provides two arguments that error-driven learners of constraint-based grammars should not aim to directly mirror the frequency of constraint violation and satisfaction in the target words of a language. The first argument comes from a class of stages attested in phonological development, called Intermediate Faith (IF) stages, in which children produce marked structures only in privileged positions. Two such stages are presented and analyzed, from the literature on English and French L1 acquisition, and their learning consequences are examined. The second argument concerns the degree of restrictiveness that a learner?s end-state grammar encodes, using two hypothetical interactions between learner?s assumptions about hidden structure and developing constraint rankings that can trick a learner into adopting a superset grammar. These two arguments are used to support an approach called Error-Selective Learning (ESL), in which errors are learned and stored gradually, in a way that relies on violation frequency, but rankings themselves are learned in a non-gradual way (relying on the algorithms of Prince and Tesar 2004; Hayes 2004). It is also shown that violation frequencies can still cause problems regardless of a learner?s method of grammatical evaluation ? either ranked constraints as in Optimality Theory, or weighted constraints as in Harmonic Grammar. :: [preprint paper] back to top Gradual learning and faithfulness: consequences of ranked vs. weighted constraints. This paper investigates a class of stages in L1 phonological acquisition where children faithfully produce marked structures only in privileged positions. We present one such stage, referred here to here as an Intermediate Faith (IF) stage, using data from the acquisition of Hebrew reported by Bat-El (2007). The privileged domain in this case is defined morphologically (noun vs. non-noun). We then show how a gradual, on-line learner using weighted constraints as in Harmonic Grammar naturally passes through IF stages, which we model as gang effects between general and specific Faithfulness constraints. Finally, we compare the performance of a ranked constraint learner to that of the HG system developed here. :: [ NELS38 proceedings paper ] back to top Learning phonological regularities across modalities This paper reports two studies aimed at determining how well adults learn novel phonotacics from brief perceptual (auditory) exposure, and how this exposure affects their latter production in a speeded repetition task (following Onishi et al 2002.) The results at this point are used to suggest that, for adults, generalizing novel phonotactic experience across modalities (i.e. from perception to production) is rather hard. Current studies are attempting to clarify this result, using different experimental tasks. :: [LSA2008 handout] back to top Biases and Stages in Phonotactic Learning (dissertation) This dissertation presents Error-Selective Learning, an error-driven model of phonological acquisition in Optimality Theory which is both restrictive and gradual. Together these two properties provide a model that can derive many attested intermediate stages in phonological development, and yet also explains how learners eventually converge on the target grammar. Error-Selective Learning is restrictive because its ranking algorithm is a version of Biased Constraint Demotion (BCD: Prince and Tesar, 2004). BCD learners store their errors in a table called the Support, and use ranking biases to build the most restrictive ranking compatible with their Support. The version of BCD adopted here has three such biases: (i) one for high-ranking Markedness (Smolensky 1996) (ii) on for high-ranking OO-Faith constraints (McCarthy 1998); Hayes 2004); and (iii) one for ranking specific IO-Faith constraints above general ones (Smith 2000; Hayes 2004). Error-Selective Learning is gradual because it uses a novel mechanism for introducing errors into the Support. As errors are made they are not immediately used to learn new rankings, but rather stored temporarily in an Error Cache. Learning via BCD is only triggered once some constraint has caused too many errors to be ignored. Once learning is triggered, the learner chooses one best error in the Cache to add to the Support -- an error that will cause minimal changes to the current grammar.
The first main chapter synthesizes the existing arguments for this BCD algorithm, and emphasizes the necessity of the Support's stored errors. The subsequent chapter presents Error-Selective Learning, using cross-linguistic examples of attested intermediate stages that can be accounted for in this approach. The next chapter compares ESL to a well-known alternative, the Gradual Learning Algorithm (GLA: Boersma, 1997, 1998; Boersma and Hayes, 2001), and argues that the GLA is overall not well-suited to learning restrictively because it does not store its errors, and because it cannot reason from errors to rankings in the way that BCD does. The final chapter presents an artificial language learning experiment, designed to test for high-ranking OO-faith in children's grammar, whose results are consistent with the biases and stages of Error-Selective Learning. |