While theoretical phonologists rely on abstract phonetic features to account for the variety of phonological patterns that exist in the world’s languages, it is unclear whether such abstract representations bear psychological reality. Previous research has shown that learners in artificial grammar learning experiments are able to generalize a newly learned phonological pattern to novel segments...

This paper provides a computational analysis of 39 attested vowel harmony patterns in a recent typological analysis (Nevins, 2010), in addition to two unattested harmony patterns which have attracted considerable discussion: ‘majority rules’ (Lombardi, 1999; Baković, 2000) and ‘sour grapes’ (Padgett, 1995). It is shown that these attested patterns, unlike the two unattested ones, are subsequent...

The feature 'tense' (as applied to vowels) has been widely discussed (cf. Chomsky and Halle,1 Jakobson and Halle, 2 and Stewart3), particularly with respect to its articulatory correlates and relationship to vowel duration. Motivated apparently by persistent questions about the articulatory correlates of 'tense' and certain acoustic considerations, Halle and Stevens4 have suggested a revision o...

0. Introduction Features which pattern as inert with respect to phonological processes are often unnecessary in distinguishing segments in an inventory. The relationship between phonological activity and contrastiveness has been modeled in theories of underspecification (e.g. Archangeli 1984, Steriade 1987). However, there is no consensus on how to determine which features are contrastive. The ...

1. Introduction Vowel harmony is a requirement by which vowels in a certain domain agree in one or more phonetic features. 1 In Hungarian, the feature subject to harmony is the horizontal position of the tongue ([±back]). In many Hungarian roots, vowels in a word are either all front or all back, as in öröm 'joy', város 'city' (umlaut denotes front round vowels, and acute accent denotes length)...

in sociolinguistics, the role of factors such as level of education in different aspects of language has always been the focus of attention. the present research, which was conducted in mashhad, seeks to study phonological processes among educated and uneducated speakers compared to standard persian. the data was gathered through field method and interview to analyze processes such as assimilat...