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This dissertation used an artificial paradigm learning test to determine whether the cross-linguistic frequency of patterns (phonological harmony) is related to their learnability in human participants.
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... Work on learning biases in phonology has focused on discovering their existence and underlying mechanisms. Primarily using artificial language learning paradigms, learning bias studies in phonology have tested two types of learning bias hypotheses: (a) structurally more complex patterns are harder to learn, called the complexity bias hypothesis (e.g., Chambers et al., 2010;Cristià & Seidl, 2008;Kuo, 2008;Pycha et al., 2003;Saffran & Thiessen, 2003;Skoruppa, 2009), and (b) patterns lacking phonetic substance are harder to learn, called the substantive bias hypothesis (e.g., Carpenter, 2005Carpenter, , 2006Carpenter, , 2010Koo, 2007;Nevin, 2010;Peperkamp & Bouchon, 2011;Pycha et al., 2003;Toro et al., 2008;Wilson, 2003Wilson, , 2006Zaba, 2008). While findings of complexity bias in artificial language learning are generally robust, the diagnosis of (phonetic) substantive bias in artificial language learning paradigms is more difficult. ...
This article examines whether children alter a variable phonological pattern in an artificial language towards a phonetically-natural form. We address acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern through the use of two artificial languages; one with dominant harmony pattern, and another with dominant non-harmony pattern. Overall, children favor harmony pattern in their production of the languages. In the language where harmony is non-dominant, children's subsequent production entirely reverses the pattern so that harmony predominates. This differs starkly from adults. Our results compare to the regularization found in child learning of morphosyntactic variation, suggesting a role for naturalness in variable phonological learning.
... For instance, Zaba (2008) observes that learners exposed to ambiguous training prefer stem-triggered vowel harmony, where the suffix changes to agree with the stem, over suffix-triggered vowel harmony, where the stem changes to agree with the suffix, in a paradigm where stem ] stem+suffix pairs were presented. This may mean that there is an innate bias against suffix-triggered vowel harmony (Zaba 2008) but it may also mean that learners disprefer stem changes when two variants of a stem are in close temporal proximity. By contrast, the present results also strengthen studies in which no preference against particular types of stem changes is observed despite source-oriented training (e.g., vowel changes in the stem vs. vowel suffixation as markers of plurality in Bybee & Newman 1995). ...
This paper reports an experiment testing the extent to which learners of a language acquire and rely on source-oriented vs. product-oriented generalizations (Bybee 1985, 2001) as a function of the learning situation. Grammar learning is tested using both ratings and elicited production, with similar results across the two modalities. In one training paradigm (source-oriented training), learners are exposed to singular-plural pairs. In the other paradigm (product-oriented training), learners are exposed to individual singular or plural forms in random order. Product-oriented training features fewer word types and a higher token/type ratio. Learners are exposed to miniature artificial languages featuring velar palatalization (kti). Product-oriented training results in weakened restrictions on sources that can be mapped onto a product compared to source-oriented training. In addition, examples of –i simply attaching to an alveopalatal affricate (tti) are shown to support kti in product-oriented training while supporting kki in source-oriented training. Thus, product-oriented training draws attention to the form of the product in the (tti) examples and away from the relationship between source and product, suggesting that the shape of the learned grammar is influenced by presentation conditions (Valian & Coulson 1988) and/or the size of the lexicon exemplifying the grammar. Across presentation conditions, learners are shown to 1) resolve competition for a source form between generalizations or possible product forms stochastically (Albright & Hayes 2003), 2) pay more attention to the form of the product than to the source-product relationship (Bybee 2001), 3) extract a grammar containing both positive product-oriented generalizations and paradigm uniformity constraints (Stemberger & Bernhardt 1999), and 4) overgeneralize, disobeying the Subset Principle (Hale & Reiss 2003) in ways expected under the hypothesis that the output of perception is a probability distribution, rather than the identity of the most likely structure (Kruschke 2008, Levy 2009). Finally, when asked to learn words, learners are shown to pay most attention to the most informative wordforms in a morphological family (cf. Albright 2005, 2008).
The role of inductive biases has been actively examined in work on phonological learning. While previous studies systematically supported a structural bias hypothesis, i.e., patterns with simpler phonological featural descriptions are easier to learn, the results have been mixed for a substantive bias hypothesis, i.e., phonetically motivated patterns are easier to learn. This study explores an explanation for the uncertain status of substantive bias in phonological learning. Among the aspects of phonetic substance, we focus on articulatory factors. We hypothesize that practice producing phonological patterns makes salient to learners the articulatory factors underlying articulatorily (un-)grounded patterns. An artificial language learning experiment was conducted to test the learning of postnasal (de)voicing, a pattern which is primarily grounded on articulatory components. We examine the role of production in the learning of articulatorily grounded (postnasal voicing) vs. ungrounded patterns (postnasal devoicing), by comparing the outcomes of perception-only vs. perception-with-production learning contexts, both in categorical and variable pattern learning conditions. The results show evidence for a production effect, but it was restricted to certain contexts, namely those involving a higher level of uncertainty and for languages exhibiting dominant natural patterns. We discuss the implications of our findings for phonological learning and language change.
