Speaker: Giorgio Magri (Jean Nicod)
\nDate\/Time: 4\/18 (Wed) 5 pm
\nLocation: 32D-831
\nTitle: The OT error-driven ranking model of the acquisition of phonotactics: some computational results<\/p>\n
Abstract:<\/p>\n
\nNine-month-old infants already react differently to licit vs illicit sound combinations, thus displaying knowledge of the target adult phonotactics. Children must thus rely on a remarkably efficient phonotactics learning strategy. What could it look like? According to the error-driven learning model<\/b>, the learner maintains a current hypothesis of the target adult phonotactics and keeps slightly updating its current hypothesis whenever it makes a mistake on the incoming stream of data from the adult language. This learning model has been endorsed by the Optimality Theoretic<\/b> (OT) acquisition literature because of its cognitive plausibility: it models the observed acquisition gradualness, as it describes a stepwise progression towards the target adult grammar; it relies on surface phonology without requiring any knowledge of morphology, that plausibly develops later than phonotactics; and it does not impose unrealistic memory requirements, as it only looks at a piece of data at the time without keeping track of previously seen data. Bridging cognitive plausibility with computational soundness, my current project defends the hypothesis that OT error-driven learning provides a proper model of the child acquisition of phonotactics. The project is articulated around five core issues. The first issue concerns convergence<\/b>: does the model eventually stop making mistakes and settle on a final grammar? The second issue concerns correctness<\/b>: does the final grammar entertained by the model at convergence indeed capture the target phonotactics? The third issue concerns modeling adequacy<\/b>: do the learning sequences formally predicted by the model match attested child acquisition paths? The fourth issue concerns robustness and variation<\/b>: how does the model behave in the presence of noise and how can it make sense of the pervasive phenomenon of child variation? The fifth issue concerns framework selection<\/b>: how can the choice of the OT framework be justified from a learning theoretic perspective? This talk will provide an overview of the project, with a focus on some recent results concerning the first two issues of convergence and correctness. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Speaker: Giorgio Magri (Jean Nicod) Date\/Time: 4\/18 (Wed) 5 pm Location: 32D-831 Title: The OT error-driven ranking model of the acquisition of phonotactics: some computational results Abstract: Nine-month-old infants already react differently to licit vs illicit sound combinations, thus displaying knowledge of the target adult phonotactics. Children must thus rely on a remarkably efficient phonotactics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4053","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\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4053"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4053\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4078,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4053\/revisions\/4078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}