This chapter addresses harmony systems, a term which encompasses consonant harmony, vowel harmony, and vowel-consonant harmony. Harmony refers to phonological assimilation for harmonic feature(s) that may operate over a string of multiple segments. This can be construed in one of two ways. Two segments may interact “at a distance” across at least one (apparently) unaffected segment, as shown fo...

Tahltan is an Athapaskan language with perhaps the world's only three-way consonant harmony system (dental, alveolar, and alveopalatal). Although most explanations have depended on feature analysis, Gafos [1] proposed that differences in tongue grooving could account for the pattern. Here, we use ultrasound to examine the initial plausibility of this argument by determining whether a language w...

The phonology and clinically induced learning patterns of a female child with a phonological delay (age 4;11) were examined from the analytical perspective of Optimality Theory. The analysis revealed that a Consonant Harmony error pattern affected alveolar stops from two different sources-from underlying lexical representations and from representations derived by an interacting error pattern of...

The Agreement-By-Correspondence framework (=‘ABC’) is a theory of agreement developed (by Walker 2000a,b, Hansson 2001, and especially Rose & Walker 2004) to explain long-distance consonant harmony: patterns where non-adjacent consonants agree with each other, but do not interact with the other material that intervenes between them. In ABC, the basis for this agreement is Surface Correspondence...

Local consonant–vowel (C–V) interaction is attested in many languages, both as a phonetic and as a phonological process. There can be a clear developmental relationship between the two, with phonologisation of phonetic interaction occurring quite commonly (Hyman 1976, Ohala 1981). Thus, a common (historical) context for nasal vowels is an adjacent nasal consonant. When consonants trigger non-lo...

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...

Coronal harmony in Kinyarwanda causes alveolar fricatives to become postalveolar preceding a postalveolar fricative within a stem. Alveolar and postalveolar stops, affricates and palatals block coronal harmony, but the flap and non-coronal consonants are reported to be transparent. Kinematic data on consonant production in Kinyarwanda were collected using electromagnetic articulography. The mea...

This paper addresses the on-going debate over the distinction between Agreement by Correspondence (Hansson 2001; Rose and Walker 2004; a.o.) and the previously dominant theory of autosegmental feature spreading, focusing on a key conceptual difference between the two theories: the role of similarity as the basis of harmony patterns. It is argued that Agreement by Correspondence’s unique ability...

Initially, it was believed that blocking effects1 simply could not be modeled with Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) (Hansson 2001; Rose & Walker 2004). Hansson, in particular, lays out this assumption very clearly: “Intervening segments do not themselves enter into the agreement relation holding between the trigger-target pair, and therefore they must be irrelevant to that relation: they canno...