Harmony systems are often described in the linguistic literature in a highly schematic and somewhat idealized fashion. Further, instances of disharmony within harmony languages typically have been treated as exceptional or anomalous, rather than as a natural and expected part of the harmony system. In documenting several vowel harmony languages indigenous to Siberia, we found both highly patter...

Sound patterns of vowel harmony reduce articulatory effort which facilitates speech production with increased speech rate and accuracy. We argue that back harmony patterns reduce articulatory effort compared to height harmony and non-harmony patterns and harmony patterns formed from front unrounded (FU) vowels reduce articulatory effort compared to those of front rounded (FR)vowels. We report o...

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 artif...

General vowel harmony and disharmony rules have comparable formal complexity but differ dramatically in typological frequency phonetic motivation. Previous studies found no difference learning between disharmony; this putative equivalence has been used to discount the view that learners are influenced by substantive biases. In current study, we use a more nuanced test show there is clear dishar...

Three experiments investigated the role of word stress and vowel harmony in speech segmentation. Finnish has fixed word stress on the initial syllable, and vowels from a front or back harmony set cannot co-occur within a word. In Experiment 1, we replicated the results of Suomi, McQueen, and Cutler (1997) showing that Finns use a mismatch in vowel harmony as a word boundary cue when the target-...

harmony and disharmony are generally considered in isolation in the phonological literature. this has led to a striking asymmetry in their analyses. in this article, it is argued that both phenomena call for a parallel treatment and that this can be accomplished within correspondence theory.correspondence theory provides a general framework for defining faithfulness constraints. what happens in...

In this paper, I will give a detailed account of vowel harmony, disharmony, dissimilation, and elision in Yucatec Maya. These phenomena provide insights for the treatment of assimilation in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The theoretical topics to be dealt with are (i) an adequate formalisation of phonological feature assimilation within Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 199...

We report six experiments on learnability of four non-adjacent phonotactic constraints which differ in their attested frequency and phonetic conditioning factors; liquid harmony, liquid disharmony, backness harmony, and backness disharmony. Our results suggest that such phonotactic constraints can be implicitly learned from brief experience and that learnability of a phonological grammar may be...

This paper examines whether adults can adapt to novel accents of their native language that contain unfamiliar context-dependent phonological alternations. In two experiments, French participants listen to short stories read in accented speech. Their knowledge of the accents is then tested in a forced-choice identification task. In Experiment 1, two groups of listeners are exposed to newly crea...