Testing for OO-Faithfulness in the Acquisition of Consonant Clusters

Abstract

This article provides experimental evidence for the claim in Hayes (2004) and McCarthy (1998) that language learners are biased to assume that morphological paradigms should be phonologically-uniform—that is, that derived words should retain all the phonological properties of their bases. The evidence comes from an artificial language word-learning paradigm, in which children learned novel objects names such as wutch and a plural suffix -del in an alien language and then were asked to produce alien words with difficult coda-onset clusters, some of which straddled the singular +del suffix boundary. The results suggest that 4-year-olds who are acquiring novel consonant clusters are preferentially faithful to the base segments in a derived word, e.g. wutch in plural wutch del. The article interprets these results from the perspective of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004; Tesar & Smolensky 2000), using Output-Output Faithfulness constraints (Benua 2000) to understand the asymmetries in the observed phonologies of derived and underived test items.