Abstract Durieux
Much of the debate concerning the acquisition of stress systems has been concerned with the question whether children acquire their native language's stress system in a word by word fashion, by memorizing words with their stress patterns, or whether they derive stress rules (or constraint rankings) from the input and apply these rules (or constraints) productively. For Dutch at least, the former position currently seems largely abandoned in favour of the rule-based approach, and the focus of attention has shifted to the position of irregular items.In this paper we want to rekindle the original debate, and argue that at least some form of the word-by-word position is needed to account for adult processing of irregulars. The starting point for discussion will be provided by an Instance Based Learning model of stress assignment. From this model, a number of predictions are derived that are subsequently tested in a psycholinguistic experiment. The remainder of the paper discusses whether the results obtained point towards a hybrid (DMM) model encompassing both rules and instances, or whether a single mechanism model is sufficient. This question will be dealt with mainly from a modelling point of view, using both Instance Based Learning approaches and hybrid models.
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