An opacity-tolerant conspiracy in phonological acquisition

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Daniel A. Dinnsen
Ashley W. Farris-Trimble

Abstract

This paper presents an example of a developmental conspiracy that interacted with another error pattern to yield opacity (i.e., generalizations that were not surface-true). The data were drawn from the Developmental Phonology Archive at Indiana University (Gierut 2008) and came from a female child (Child 5T, age 4;3) with a phonological delay. Our analysis revealed a conspiracy among several independent, commonly occurring error patterns that merged place and manner distinctions in word-initial position. An account is formulated in terms of optimality theory with candidate chains (McCarthy 2007) with the intent of exploring this new frameworks implications for acquisition. Attention is also given to the question of how opacity effects are learned.

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