Constraints on Abstraction: Generalization Across Languages

Recent research has suggested a division between lexical representations and phonological patterns; lexical items are stored with talker-specific information, while phonological patterns are represented at a separate, abstract level of representation (Finley, 2013; Smolensky & Legendre, 2006). The present paper provides further evidence for this proposal, demonstrating that learners will extend a novel phonological pattern (vowel harmony) to speakers of a novel dialect when the words are familiar, but not when the words are unfamiliar, further supporting a distinction between the representations of lexical items and the representations of phonological patterns.