2019/11/25 by Alexander Martin, James White · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Phonetics and Phonology Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1162/ling_a_00375
openalex publication_date 2019/11/25 · crossref created 2019/11/25 · crossref issued 2021/01/01 · crossref published 2021/01/01 · crossref published-print 2021/01/01 · crossref deposited 2021/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
General vowel harmony and disharmony rules have comparable formal complexity but differ dramatically in typological frequency and phonetic motivation. Previous studies found no difference in learning between vowel harmony and disharmony; this putative equivalence has been used to discount the view that learners are influenced by substantive learning biases. In the current study, we use a more nuanced test to show that there is a clear difference in learning between vowel harmony and disharmony: learners readily infer a vowel harmony pattern, but not a disharmony pattern. The findings suggest that vowel disharmony is in fact strongly disfavored during learning.