The Transmission of Vowel Harmony and Vowel Disharmony: An Iterated Learning Study

Substantive bias affects phonological acquisition in a way that learners may more readily learn phonetically motivated patterns. Some previous experimental work has proved the effect of substantive synchronic context, whereas how influences diachronic changes hardly been studied. This paper investigates role transmission. We employed iterated learning paradigm to compare transmissions two artificial languages exhibiting vowel harmony (phonetically natural) or disharmony unnatural). In general, participants performed equally well conditions, and proportions patterns showed similar decreasing tendency over generations, suggesting no process language