Anne-Michelle Tessier will present a research seminar.
Click to join Zoom meeting. The passcode is 635410. (The meeting ID is 647 6334 5823.)
Studies in learning French liaison: representations, predictions, results, errorsThis talk will introduce my current research project, in collaboration with Karen Jesney at Carleton and several others, to combine a novel view of phonological representations with some existing and new data on a well-known phenomenon to produce some hopefully insightful results about learning. First I will sketch the phenomenon: the French morpho-phonological alternation called ‘liaison’, focusing mostly on its simplest, obligatory contexts. Next I will ruthlessly summarize Smolensky and Goldrick (2016)’s analysis of liaison using their novel view of lexical representations (‘Gradient Symbolic Representations), where e.g. the French word ‘petit’ might underlying end with a segment that is .06 (60%) of a /t/. And then I will present two new studies of how a GSR learner of French might mirror human learning: first using simulations of child liaison errors over time, as compared to corpus data from Chevrot and colleagues, and then with the very preliminary results of a nonce word production study with adult speakers of Canadian French. The ultimate take-home message will be that our GSR learning model makes interesting new predictions about how and when liaison should be productive; some of these are significant improvements on existing models, and some are fascinatingly wrong — both of which should be instructive for further research.
