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Context-sensitive underspecification and the acquisition of phonemic contrasts*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Daniel A. Dinnsen
Daniel A. Dinnsen*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
*
Department of Linguistics, Indiana University, Memorial Hall 332, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. e-mail: dinnsen@ucs.indiana.edu.
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Abstract

Several competing proposals for the (under)specification of phonological representations are evaluated against the facts of phonemic acquisition. Longitudinal evidence relating to the emergence of a voice contrast in the well-documented study of Amahl (from age 2;2 to 3;11) is reconsidered. Neither contrastive specification nor context-free radical underspecification is capable of accounting for the facts. The problem is in the characterization of the change in the status of a feature from being noncontrastive and conditioned by context at one stage to being contrastive with phonetic effects that diffuse gradually through the lexicon. Both frameworks must treat as accidental the persistence of the early substitution pattern and require the postulation of wholesale changes in underlying representations, where these changes do not accord well with the observed phonetic changes or with the facts available to the learner. Context-sensitive radical underspecification provides a plausible account of each stage and the transition between stages with minimal grammar change.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , February 1996 , pp. 57 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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Footnotes

[*]

I am especially grateful to Jessica Barlow for her assistance in carrying out various phases of this research and to Steve Chin, Phil Connell, Stuart Davis, Judith Gierut, David Ingram and Gregory Iverson for their many helpful comments and suggestions. Aspects of this work were first presented in 1993 at SUNY/Buffalo, the University of Washington, and the University of British Columbia. This work was supported in part by grants to Indiana University from the National Institutes of Health, DC00260, DC00076, and DC01694.

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