1. Variation awaiting bias: Substantively biased learning of vowel harmony variation.
- Author
-
Do Y and Mooney S
- Subjects
- Adult, Child, Family, Humans, Language, Learning, Language Development, Phonetics
- Abstract
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.
- Published
- 2022
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