1. Learning Exceptions in Phonological Alternations.
- Author
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Finley, Sara
- Subjects
- *
SPEECH perception , *EXPERIMENTAL design , *STATISTICS , *PHONOLOGICAL awareness , *COMPARATIVE grammar , *LEARNING , *SENSORY stimulation , *COMPARATIVE studies , *PHONETICS , *VERBAL behavior , *DESCRIPTIVE statistics , *LOGISTIC regression analysis , *DATA analysis , *MEDICAL coding - Abstract
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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
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