Phonological Activeness Bias Effects in Language Acquisition and Language Structuring
Creators: name: Carter, William
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2017

description: The task of language acquisition constitutes an inductive problem in which learners must
generalize numerous productive linguistic patterns with only a small subset of all potential inputs
as the learning data (Chomsky, 1980; Pinker, 1979). Faced with this “poverty of the stimulus”
(Chomsky, 1980), the need for inductive generalization is apparent, and previous work shows
that a set of biases that reduce the set of viable generalizations to consider and facilitate choosing
certain generalizations over others are required to extrapolate patterns beyond the initial learning
data (Mitchell, 1990; Wilson, 2006). Therefore, the identification of domain-general and
language-specific inductive biases pertaining to language acquisition is fundamental in
constructing an accurate model of human language learning and has been the focus of many
studies (Becker et al., 2011; Moreton, 2008; Pater & Moreton, 2012; Wilson, 2006 among
others).
The current project proposes the existence of one such inductive bias in the phonological
domain towards acquiring pattern generalizations which make use of features that are already
more phonologically active in a learner’s grammar(s). Here, phonological activeness is defined
as the relative degree to which a certain feature (e.g. [voice]) is referenced in the denotations of
natural classes in the phonological component of a learner’s grammar (acquired phonological
patterns and phonotactic distributions). The proposed bias, which favors reimplementing features
proportional to their activeness, constitutes an example of a preferential attachment process (also
called a cumulative advantage or Yule process) (Price, 1976).
Evidence for this phonological activeness bias is found by observing its predicted effects
in language acquisition via an artificial language learning task in which 100 English
monolinguals learned sound alternations triggered either by an active feature of English, [+/-
front], or an inactive feature, [+/- high]. Trends suggest that English speakers were able to better
learn the pattern triggered by [+/- front], supporting a bias towards acquiring patterns involving
active features. This indicates that learners aren’t simply biased towards acquiring/implementing
patterns motivated by L1 rules in another language as suggested in Pater & Tessier (2006), but
rather that they are more primed to “notice” and then acquire novel patterns implementing
features used frequently in their L1 phonology (English in this case). In addition, intra-language
distributions of feature frequencies for a sample of phonological rules/phonotactic distributions
closely fit the predicted frequency distributions generated by a well-known preferential
attachment algorithm, the Indian Buffet Process (Griffiths & Ghahramani, 2005, 2011),
suggesting that the nature of such an acquisition bias has a noticeable effect on the overall
structure of language grammars, raising potential implications for language typology and
evolution.