Defying the stimulus: acquisition of complex onsets in Polish

• Published in: Phonology Vol. 34; no. 2; pp. 269 - 298
• Main Author: Jarosz, Gaja
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01-08-2017
• Subjects: Auditory Perception; Bias; Children; English language; Grammar; Korean language; Language acquisition; Language disorders; Linguistic Input; Listening Comprehension; Mandarin; Multilingualism; Native Language; Native language acquisition; Onset (Phonology); Phonetics; Phonological processing; Phonology; Polish language; Preferences; Principles; Sonority; Speech; Studies; Syllables
• ISSN: 0952-6757; 1469-8188
• DOI: 10.1017/S0952675717000148

Behavioural findings indicate that English, Mandarin and Korean speakers exhibit gradient sonority sequencing preferences among unattested initial clusters. While some have argued these results support an innate principle, recent modelling studies have questioned this conclusion, showing that computational models capable of inducing generalisations using abstract phonological features can detect these preferences from lexical statistics in the three languages. This paper presents a computational analysis of the development of initial clusters in Polish, which arguably presents a stronger test of these models. We show that (i) the statistics of Polish contradict the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), favouring sonority plateaus, (ii) models that succeed in the other languages do not predict SSP preferences for Polish and (iii) children nonetheless exhibit sensitivity to the SSP, favouring onset clusters with larger sonority rises.