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<Paper uid="W04-1306">
  <Title>On the Acquisition of Phonological Representations</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="41" end_page="42" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> I will discuss the extent to which representations are intertwined with the grammar, and consequences of this fact for acquisition models. I will focus on phonological representations, but the argument extends to other components of the grammar.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> One might suppose that phonological representations can be acquired directly from the acoustic signal. If, for example, children are equipped with innate phonetic feature detectors, one might suppose that they can use these to extract phonetic features from the signal. These extracted phonetic features would then constitute phonological representations (surface, or phonetic, representations). Once these are acquired, they can serve as a basis from which learners can acquire the rest of the grammar, namely, the phonological rules (and/or constraints) and the lexical, or underlying, representations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This idea of acquisition by stages, with representations preceding rules, has enduring appeal, though details vary with the prevailing theory of grammar; versions of this theory can be found in (Bloch, 1941) and (Pinker, 1994:264 5). The idea could not be implemented in American Structuralist phonology, however (Chomsky, 1964), and I will argue that it remains untenable today. I will discuss two areas of phonology in which representations must be acquired together with the grammar, rather than prior to it. The first concerns the grammar of stress, or metrical phonology. The second concerns the acquisition of phonological features. These pose different sorts of problems for learning models. The first has been the subject of considerable discussion. The second, to my knowledge, has not been discussed in the context of formal learning models. Though it has often been assumed, as mentioned above, that acquisition of features might be the most straightforward aspect of phonological acquisition, I will argue that it presents challenging problems for learning models.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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