{"pk":24686,"title":"Feature-based generalisation in sound pattern learning depends on phonetic motivation","subtitle":null,"abstract":"It has been claimed that language learners are better at acquiring phonetically motivated phonological patterns compared to unmotivated patterns; this hypothesis is known as substantively biased phonological learning. We test this hypothesis by exposing French-speaking participants (n=120) to either a vowel harmony pattern (phonetically motivated) or a vowel disharmony pattern (comparable formal complexity but phonetically unmotivated) in an artificial language. Participants were trained with noun roots and a single suffix, but at test were required to add multiple suffixes to roots, including a novel suffix with a vowel unobserved during training. Although participants performed equally well when adding a single suffix, only those in the harmony condition generalized when adding two suffixes (including the held-out suffix). This work expands on previous research by showing feature-based generalization of harmony, but not disharmony, to novel affixes held out from training. It provides strong evidence for the substantively biased phonological learning account.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Language learning; Phonology; Computer-based experiment"}],"section":"Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1q00v5s6","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alexander","middle_name":"","last_name":"Martin","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Groningen","department":""},{"first_name":"James","middle_name":"","last_name":"White","name_suffix":"","institution":"University College London","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24686/galley/21185/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24686/galley/14284/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24686/galley/18109/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24686/galley/21185/download/"}]}