Acquisition of Voicing Alternations

Abstract

"Morpho-phonological alternations are central to phonological theory, but little is known about how they are acquired. Acquiring alternations amounts to dealing with variation in a morpheme’s shape depending on its morphological context. It is generally assumed that children start with an initial stage of phonotactic learning, after which morphology is acquired, i.e. the analysis of words into meaningful units or morphemes. In Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), alternations occur when two or more output forms share a single input form, the lexical or underlying representation. Hence, alternating forms are characterised by a lack of faithfulness to the underlying form of a morpheme. It is not fully understood how children store lexical items and represent the relationship between their contextual variants. Moreover, it is unclear whether early lexical representations differ from those of adults. Here, the various models of morphological processing, such as ‘dual-route’ models (e.g. Baayen et al. 1997) or ‘whole word’ models (e.g. Bybee 1995) will not be addressed"