Learning Exceptions in Phonological Alternations

The present study explores learning phonological alternations that contain exceptions. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony pattern in which a regular suffix obeyed a vowel harmony rule, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and a n...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language and speech 2021-12, Vol.64 (4), p.991-1017
Main Author: Finley, Sara
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bias
Experiments
Language acquisition
Morphemes
Morphology
Morphophonemics
Phonemes
Phonetic features
Phonology
Suffixes
Vowel harmony
Vowels
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Summary:The present study explores learning phonological alternations that contain exceptions. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony pattern in which a regular suffix obeyed a vowel harmony rule, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and a non-alternating suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experiment 1 learned the behavior of both suffixes, but correct performance for the non-alternating suffix was higher when the suffix happened to be in harmony with the stem. Participants in Experiment 2 were exposed to the non-alternating affix in harmonic contexts only, and continued to show a bias towards harmony. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with minimal training on disharmonic cases of the non-alternating morpheme. However, participants were less likely to learn the alternating affix without exposure to morphological stem, stem + suffix alternations in Experiment 4, suggesting a bias towards morphophonological alternations in learning vowel harmony patterns.
ISSN:0023-8309
1756-6053
DOI:10.1177/0023830920978679