Constraint Ranking in Child Production and Perception

Joe Pater
University of Massachusetts

This paper begins by reviewing arguments for the use of ranked constraints to account for children's production patterns, focusing on the domain of onset cluster reduction. I will then show that constraint ranking also provides a line of attack on the "comprehension/production" dilemma. I provide a model of the development of receptive phonology that uses domain-independent markedness constraints, but domain-specific faithfulness constraints, and discuss the predictions that such a model makes.

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