{"id":12766,"date":"2019-10-07T05:59:34","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T09:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=12766"},"modified":"2019-10-07T11:10:24","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T15:10:24","slug":"experimentalist-meeting-10-11-daniel-asherov-mit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2019\/10\/07\/experimentalist-meeting-10-11-daniel-asherov-mit\/","title":{"rendered":"Experimentalist Meeting 10\/11 - Daniel Asherov (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


Speaker:<\/strong> Daniel Asherov (joint work with Ezer Rasin & Roni Katzir)
Location:<\/strong> 32-D461
Time: <\/strong>Friday, October 11, 2:00-3:00pm
Title<\/strong>: Learning alternations from allophonic distribution<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When learning a phonology of a language, the learner faces the task of discovering the language\u0092s phonological alternations: the ways in which the shape of morphemes changes in a predictable way, usually to accommodate phonotactic requirements of the language. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, in the grammar of Yamato Japanese s<\/em><\/strong> alternates with ?<\/em><\/strong>: the (bound) morpheme \/hanas<\/strong>\/<\/em> surfaces with ? <\/em>before i<\/em>[hana?<\/strong><\/em>-<\/em><\/strong>imasu <\/em>\u0091talk non-past-polite\u0092] and s<\/em> otherwise [hanas<\/strong><\/em>-<\/em><\/strong>u <\/em>\u0091talk non-past\u0092]. This alternation serves to repair the sequence si<\/em>, which is prohibited in Japanese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Computational learners of phonology make conflicting predictions with respect to the type of evidence required for positing an alternation such as the s~? alternation in Japanese. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One group of learners does not take economy into consideration (e.g. RIP\/CD, Tesar & Smolensky 2000). Given a set of surface forms with the Yamato Japanese pattern, they are expected to correctly detect the prohibition on si.<\/em> However, they can only learn the correct repair (s ? ?<\/strong> \/_i) if they are presented with direct evidence for the alternation in form of non-identical occurrences of the same morpheme (e.g. hanas<\/strong>-<\/strong><\/em>u + <\/em>hana?<\/strong>-<\/strong><\/em>imasu<\/em>), with the information that these forms belong to the same paradigm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another group of learners is one where learners balance restrictiveness and economy (e.g. MDL, Rasin & Katzir 2016). Such a learner will only posit the prohibition *si<\/em> <\/em>when it would <\/em>make the grammar and the description of the data more compact. In the case of a language like Yamato Japanese, the grammar can be made more compact by eliminating the sound ?<\/em> from underlying representations and deriving it in the phonology. Such a learner predicts that it should be possible in principle to infer both the phonotactic prohibition (*si<\/em>) and the correct repair (s ? ?<\/strong> \/_i) based on only Japanese-like surface forms, with no direct evidence for the alternation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will present an artificial language study with adult human learners which aims to test the applicability of these computational learners to human learning in a lab setting. I will start by presenting the design and results of a pilot study testing the conflicting predictions of the computational learners. We will then discuss a new design for a follow-up experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rasin, E., & Katzir, R. (2016). On Evaluation Metrics in Optimality Theory. Linguistic Inquiry<\/em>, 47<\/em>(2), 235\u0096282.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tesar, B., & Smolensky, P. (2000). Learnability in optimality theory<\/em>. MIT Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Daniel Asherov (joint work with Ezer Rasin & Roni Katzir)Location: 32-D461Time: Friday, October 11, 2:00-3:00pmTitle: Learning alternations from allophonic distribution When learning a phonology of a language, the learner faces the task of discovering the language\u0092s phonological alternations: the ways in which the shape of morphemes changes in a predictable way, usually to accommodate phonotactic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12766"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12794,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12766\/revisions\/12794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}