Challenging OT with dense diary data:
Constraints are not enough

Lise Menn & Ellen D. Schmidt

Abstract for paper presented at
Child Phonology Conference
University of Washington
22-23 June, 2007

Diary data from three children we have studied support OT but also show its limitations. For example, OT tidily describes consonant harmony [tub >"bub"] with ranked constraints, and competing harmonic forms [boot > "doot"; boot > "boop"] with unranked competing (probabilistic) sets of constraints. 'Exception features' can describe irregularities due to maintenance of older forms after rules have changed (down persisting after onset of nasal harmony) or due to emergence of new forms which are exceptions to a current pattern; however, they do not capture the fact that these forms reflect chronological changes. Most theoretically challenging are constraints that bear little resemblance to those in adult language, such as *#C (Finnish child phonology). We argue that rules mapping internally represented adult forms to child forms have psychological reality and are needed in addition to constraints, in spite of the redundancy that this introduces into the phonology.

Lise Menn is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Ellen D. Schmidt is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She can be reached at: Ellen.Schmidt@colorado.edu