{"pk":25499,"title":"Learning Exceptions in Phonological Alternations","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The present study explores learning phonological alternations\nthat contain exceptions. Participants were exposed to a\nback/round vowel harmony pattern in which a regular suffix\nfollowed harmony, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on\nthe back/round phonetic features of the stem, and an\nexceptional suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the\nfeatures of the stem vowel. Participants in Experiment 1\nlearned the behavior of both suffixes, but performance for the\nnon-alternating suffix was higher when the suffix happened to\nadhere to vowel harmony. In Experiment 2, participants were\nexposed only to the same suffixes as Experiment 1, but the\nnon-alternating suffix only appeared in harmonic contexts,\ncreating ambiguity between exceptionality and alternation.\nParticipants only correctly selected the non-alternating suffix\nwhen it appeared in a harmonic context. This suggests that\nlearners are biased towards alternating harmony patterns, but\nrequire concrete evidence of non-alternation to learn the nonalternating\nsuffix.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"statistical learning; vowel harmony; learning\nbiases; exceptions."}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5p94x4r8","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Sara","middle_name":"","last_name":"Finley","name_suffix":"","institution":"Department of Psychology, Pacific Lutheran University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25499/galley/15123/download/"}]}