Against Formal Phonology

Port, Robert F.; Leary, Adam

doi:10.1353/lan.2005.0195

Cited by 197 publications

(137 citation statements)

References 110 publications

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“…This training came so early in our lives, it is very difficult for us to imagine ourselves without skill at mapping speech to letters and letters to speech. It is inherently very difficult for us to think about speech without an alphabet, yet it is essential to do so if we want to understand linguistic behavior (see Port and Leary, 2005).…”

Section: Overview Of the Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We know that one who is learning to speak needs to produce and perceive phonetic trajectories in time (Jusczyk, 1997;Jusczyk and Derrah, 1987). But alphabets have serious limitations since they leave out, for example, almost all the temporal characteristics of speech and much more (see Port and Leary, 2005). But first-language learners need to get timing subtleties just right if they want to be native speakers.…”

Section: Phonology Anewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rich memory and distributed phonology

Port

2010

Language Sciences

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It is claimed here that experimental evidence about human speech processing and the richness of memory for linguistic material supports a distributed view of language where every speaker creates an idiosyncratic perspective on the linguistic conventions of the community. In such a system, words are not spelled in memory of speakers from uniform letter-like units (whether phones or phonemes), but rather from the rich auditory patterns of speech plus any coupled visual, somatosensory and motor patterns. The evidence is strong that people actually employ high-dimensional, spectro-temporal, auditory patterns to support speech production, speech perception and linguistic memory in real time. Abstract phonology (with its phonemes, distinctive features, syllable types, etc.) is actually a kind of social institution -a loose inventory of patterns that evolves over historical time in each human community as a structure with many symmetries and regularities in the community corpus. Linguistics studies the phonological (and grammatical) patterns of various communities of speakers. But linguists should not expect to find the descriptions they make to be explicitly represented in any individual speaker's mind, much less in every mind in the community. The alphabet is actually a technology that has imposed itself on our understanding of language.

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Section: Overview Of the Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Phonology Anewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rich memory and distributed phonology

Port

2010

Language Sciences

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“…9 To make this work, the segments that comprise the communication signal as it unfolds over time must, of course, be sufficiently distinct. This is true of spoken languages despite coarticulation (and the supposedly "blurry" phonology; Port and Leary, 2005), and even of sign languages (Sandler, 2006). 8 with the radical version of dynamical systems theorizing: it happens to be valid on the implementation level, and yet it is woefully inadequate, because it leaves the key computational-level issue -the nature of the principled correspondence between the states of the two systems -unresolved.…”

Section: Managing Computational Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

On the nature of minds, or: truth and consequences

Edelman

2008

Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligen

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Are minds really dynamical or are they really symbolic? Because minds are bundles of computations, and because computation is always a matter of interpretation of one system by another, minds are necessarily symbolic. Because minds, along with everything else in the universe, are physical, and insofar as the laws of physics are dynamical, minds are necessarily dynamical systems. Thus, the short answer to the opening question is "yes." It makes sense to ask further whether some of the computations that constitute a human mind are constrained by functional, algorithmic, or implementational factors to be essentially of the discrete symbolic variety (even if they supervene on an apparently continuous dynamical substrate). I suggest that here too the answer is "yes" and discuss the need for such discrete, symbolic cognitive computations in communication-related tasks. On the nature of cognitionMinds are fundamentally computational phenomena (Turing, 1950;McCulloch, 1965;Marr, 1982;Minsky, 1985;Dennett, 1991;Metzinger, 2003;McDermott, 2001;Nilsson, 2006;Minsky, 2006). The distinguishing and still surprisingly widely underappreciated feature of the explanatory framework for cognition that rests on this insight is that it has no viable alternatives (Edelman, 2008).Consider the so-called lightness problem, which is typical of visual perception: light from a source whose intensity is not directly known to the perceiver falls onto a surface whose reflectance needs to be estimated. The only course of action available to the perceiver is to try and estimate both the intensity and the reflectance from the amount of light that enters the measurement device (an eye or a camera). The pertinent observation here is that the essence of the process of distinguishing dark from light surfaces under potentially variable illumination -no matter how that process is instantiated -is a computation. Specifically, it consists of the factorization of the number that represents the measured light quantity, whereby the source intensity and the surface reflectance that are multiplicatively confounded in the measurement are recovered (Edelman, 2008, p.8). 1 All other perceptual tasks can be given similarly explicit computational formulations. * Invited target article for the special issue of JETAI on Pluralism and the Future of Cognitive Science.1 How two unknowns can be recovered from a single measurement is an interesting question (Marr, 1982;Edelman, 2008) that is beside the point for the present discussion.1 Just as perception is inherently computational, so is action. As an example, consider the nature of the problem that is solved by a cat that jumps onto a table (Edelman, 2008, p.428). This problem consists of estimating the right amount of momentum that the cat must impart to itself -a momentum that would allow it to clear the table's near edge, yet would not send it sailing over the table to hit the wall on the far side. The cat's safe landing on the table indicates that its brain has successfully carried out a series of arithme...

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“…Some may argue that in using broad transcriptions of child language, researchers implicitly assume that children represent lexical items in terms of discrete, serially ordered phonemes (e.g. Scobbie et al 2000, Port & Leary 2005. Some acquisition researchers may indeed make this assumption, but a more fundamental assumption is that children have acquired phoneme and syllable inventories that do or do not match the adult inventories.…”

Section: Vocabulary Acquisition and Phonological Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Acquisition Rate on Emergent Structure in Phonological Development

Redford¹,

Miikkulainen²

2007

lan

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Individual differences in child phonologies are often correlated with the rate at which language is being acquired. The correlation suggests some relationship between acquisition rate and language structure, but the nature of this relationship is not well understood. This article presents a computational model, the VOCABULARY EXPANSION MODEL (VEM), designed to explore how acquisition rate might interact with other constraints on phonological development to give rise to rate-dependent differences in the structure of words in a developing vocabulary. In VEM, words from a simulated adult target vocabulary are evaluated according to well-specified articulatory and perceptual costs, and selected into child vocabularies at different rates. Comparisons of the structure in the simulated child vocabularies show that words acquired early during vocabulary development have simpler phonological structures than words acquired later, and that slow word acquisition results in vocabularies with shorter words, simpler segments, greater segment to segment similarity, and simpler syllable structures than more rapid word acquisition. These results are qualitatively similar to the intra-and interindividual differences observed in children with normal and delayed language, suggesting that at least some of the structural differences may emerge from the rate at which children acquire words.*

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Against Formal Phonology

Cited by 197 publications

References 110 publications

Rich memory and distributed phonology

Rich memory and distributed phonology

On the nature of minds, or: truth and consequences

Effects of Acquisition Rate on Emergent Structure in Phonological Development

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