Optimality Theory and Phonological Acquisition: An Overview

Charles Reiss
Concordia University

This tutorial will survey several approaches to phonological acquisition and learnability within OT frameworks, focussing on their formal properties. This will include a very brief overview for non-phonologists of the components of the OT grammars presented. We will then evaluate these approaches in terms of their usefulness in providing explanatory adequacy for linguistic theory. This relates to the issue of what they assume the final state acquired (the adult grammar) to be. Finally, we will address the question of whether these approaches meet basic criteria for a learning theory.