In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific
patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in …

The study of phonotactics is a central topic in phonology. We propose a theory of
phonotactic grammars and a learning algorithm that constructs such grammars from positive …

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing emphasis on studying the link
between infant speech perception and later language acquisition. This research has yielded …

A series of experiments shows that Spanish learners of English acquire the ship-sheep
contrast in a way specific to their target dialect (Scottish or Southern British English) and that …

The author introduces the L2 Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model, a new formal and
comprehensive proposal which integrates, synthesizes, and improves on previous studies …

In this paper, I discuss a linguistic model for explaining native and secondlanguage (L2)
sound perception. In § 2, I discuss the Linguistic Perception (LP) model for general sound …

We show that loanword adaptation can be understood entirely in terms of phonological and
phonetic comprehension and production mechanisms in the first language. We provide …

This paper reconciles the standpoint that language users do not aim at improving their
sound systems with the observation that languages seem to improve their sound systems. If …

The past ten years have shown an ever-increasing revival of interest in phonological
acquisition. The introduction of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) has played …

Child language data have usually been considered as external evidence for linguistic
theory, but they have never had much influence on phonological theory. Yet, the central goal …