Non-adjacent Phonological Dependency Effects on Khalkha Mongolian Speech Perception

On a strictly phonological level, vowel harmony is perhaps the best known type of non-adjacent dependency. Vowel harmony restricts the co-occurrence of vowels, regardless of the number of intervening consonants, according to agreement of specific feature or features within a word, a word and its affixes, or sometimes even across word boundaries (van der Hulst & van der Weijer 1995). Mongolian, for example, displays both [ATR] and rounding harmony (Svantesson, Tsendina, Karlsson & Franzén 2005). As shown in (2), vowels are required to agree within a word and its affixes in terms of the feature [ATR] 1 .