On Some Problematic Phonological Alternations in Kitsai Textx

Phonological influences in syntactic alternations

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 followed harmony, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and an exceptional suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experim...

Western Sisaala – Phonological alternations in plural formation

Introduction This paper provides an original phonological analysis of some of the plural noun formations of Western Sisaala. Western Sisaala has several noun classes. The classes are distinguished by the suffixes to used to form the singular and plural. Moran (2006) tentatively identifies a few noun classes. In this squib, I discuss a subset of the plural forms attested in the language. Many of...

Using phonotactics to learn phonological alternations

1 Introduction Linguistic theory presents a search space of possible grammars. Under that theory, learning a language requires navigating that search space in order to find the correct grammar (the most restrictive grammar consistent with the overt data provided to the learner). The computational difficulty of that task depends almost entirely on the formal structure of the search space. Any pl...

Rapid acquisition of phonological alternations by infants.

We explore whether infants can learn novel phonological alternations on the basis of distributional information. In Experiment 1, two groups of 12-month-old infants were familiarized with artificial languages whose distributional properties exhibited either stop or fricative voicing alternations. At test, infants in the two exposure groups had different preferences for novel sequences involving...