Stem similarity modulates infants' acquisition of phonological alternations

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...

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...

Biased generalization of alternations 1 Running head: BIASED GENERALIZATION OF ALTERNATIONS Biased generalization of newly learned phonological alternations by 12-month-old infants

Previous work has suggested that learners are sensitive to phonetic similarity when learning phonological patterns (e.g., Steriade, 2001/2008; White, 2014). We tested 12-month-old infants to see if their willingness to generalize newly learned phonological alternations depended on the phonetic similarity of the sounds involved. Infants were exposed to words in an artificial language whose distr...

Biased generalization of newly learned phonological alternations by 12-month-old infants.

Previous work has suggested that learners are sensitive to phonetic similarity when learning phonological patterns (e.g., Steriade, 2001/2008; White, 2014). We tested 12-month-old infants to see if their willingness to generalize newly learned phonological alternations depended on the phonetic similarity of the sounds involved. Infants were exposed to words in an artificial language whose distr...