earticle

영어

This paper, focusing on the error patterns resulting from overgeneralization, analyzes two different cases of production error patterns occurring in the phonological acquisition process of English: Child 78’s error patterns from Dinnsen (2002) and Amahl’s error patterns from Smith (1973). Investigating these error patterns, this paper examines two hypotheses that have widely been agreed in previous studies of phonological acquisition based on the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993, Prince & Smolensky 2004): one is that the error pattern changes in phonological acquisition are the results of demotions of markedness constraints, and the other is that the initial state of phonological acquisition is the ranking relation whereby markedness constraints are ranked above faithfulness constraints (McCarthy & Prince 1993, Smolensky 1996a, b, Prince & Smolensky 2004). This parer shows that the error pattern changes in the acquisition processes of English in both cases are the results of recursive minimal demotions of markedness constraints, which accords well with the hypothesis of constraint demotion. However, it shows that the initial state of production acquisition is not always represented as the ranking relation whereby markedness constraints are ranked above faithfulness constraints, requiring that production acquisition should be distinguished from comprehension acquisition in terms of the initial state of phonological acquisition.