Language acquisition in optimality theory

Abstract

In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language acquisition and learning. There are many unsettled issues, however. Are the constraints innate or do they emerge during acquisition (nature-nurture)? And if they emerge, where do they come from? What is the initial state? Does the (re)ranking of constraints only involve the demotion of markedness constraints, the promotion of faithfulness constraints, or can it be achieved by both the demotion and the promotion of constraints? Another issue is whether comprehension and production are mediated by the same grammar or whether there is one grammar for comprehension and another for production. This article reviews the current state of a¤airs in language acquisition studies in OT and ends with some critical remarks and speculations on how the field is likely to develop. The concept of learning and acquisition in OT The rise of optimality theory and its consequences for acquisitionIn optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004), a grammar consists of a set of constraints on wellformedness (markedness constraints), which are violable and typically conflicting with faithfulness constraints, which govern the mapping between an input (or underlying form) and an output (the overt or surface form). Suppose we have the markedness constraint NoCoda, which bans codas, and the faithfulness constraint Max-IO, which states that input segments must have output correspondents, i.e.,

German children’s processing of morphosyntactic cues inwh-questions

“…In OT, children are argued to initially entertain a different constraint ranking than adults (e.g., Fikkert & de Hoop, 2009; Smolensky, 1996). This explains children’s non-adultlike patterns of production and interpretation.…”

Production/comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition

“…These asymmetries disappear as a result of two mechanisms: the Optimality Theoretic learning mechanism of constraint re-ranking and the application of bidirectional optimization (Fikkert & de Hoop, 2009;Hendriks, 2008).…”

L2 speech learning of European Portuguese /l/ and /ɾ/ by L1-Mandarin learners: Experimental evidence and theoretical modelling

“…( One main criticism to the application of this learning algorithm in strict OT is that it may lead to an abrupt change in the grammatical development (Fikkert & De Hoop, 2009), which does not conform to the realistic gradual learning curves (Boersma & Hayes, 2001). 47 This assumption is not necessary for learning language-specific cue knowledge, e.g.…”