Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Eleanor Glewwe (Grinnell College)

Title: Bias in the Learning of Sound Patterns: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract: A persistent question in the field of phonology is why the phonological typology exhibits asymmetries. For instance, word-final devoicing (/rad/ → [rat]) is common cross-linguistically, but word-final voicing (/rat/ →[rad]) is not observed. One hypothesis for why these asymmetries exist is that language learners are biased against acquiring certain types of sound patterns. One way of testing for such learning biases is by using artificial grammar learning experiments. Artificial grammar learning studies investigating biases in phonological learning have uncovered robust evidence for complexity bias (a bias against featurally complex patterns) but little for naturalness bias (a bias against phonetically unnatural patterns) (Moreton & Pater 2012). I present two phonotactic learning experiments that tested for both complexity bias and naturalness bias by comparing how well participants learned different distributions of a stop voicing contrast (/t/ vs. /d/). Together, the two experiments offer mixed evidence for naturalness bias but stronger evidence for complexity bias, while also demonstrating how the broader phonological structure of an artificial language affects performance. Based on the results of my experiments and a review of the experimental literature, I argue that we must distinguish between perceptually-rooted and articulatorily-rooted naturalness bias and claim that only perceptual naturalness, not articulatory naturalness, biases phonological learning.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Henry Conklin

Centre for Language Evolution