| Popis: |
How does the perceptual map (p-map) influence phonological learning? The p-map advances the hypothesis that speakers prefer to make phonological alternations that are minimally phonetically salient. In theory, this means that there is a constraint again a particular input-output mapping for every pair of phones, in every environment. Because minimally salient changes are preferred, p-map constraints are hypothesized to have default strengths; alternatively, the preference can be thought of in terms of (Bayesian) priors. It has been proposed that the strength of p-map priors correlates with the result of confusion experiments. This leads to some surprising predictions. Here, we investigate the predicted strength equivalence of two mappings, /s/ to [ʃ] and /ʃ/ to [s]. We also investigate the claim that p-map biases reflect salience of change within an environment by examining the two mappings in two environments, before [a] and before [i] |
