Poznan09

Understanding Vowel Harmony using Artificial Grammars

Sara Finley

This course will discuss the use of the artificial grammar learning paradigm to better understand the nature of linguistic typology. The course will focus on experiments in learning vowel harmony, providing evidence for the substantively biased learning hypothesis. This hypothesis posits that the distribution of linguistic patterns across the world’s languages is due in large part to constraints on learning. This course will discuss experimental evidence showing that learners are biased towards vowel harmony patterns that are: phonetically natural, structurally simple and enhance phonetic contrasts. The vowel harmony patterns that learners in the present experiments are biased to learn parallel the most frequent types of vowel harmony patterns found cross-linguistically.

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