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Learning nonadjacent dependencies in phonology: Transparent vowels in vowel harmony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Sara Finley
Sara Finley*
Affiliation:
Pacific Lutheran University
*
Xavier Hall, Room 241 Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma, WA 98447-0003 [finleysr@plu.edu]
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Extract

Nonadjacent dependencies are an important part of the structure of language. While the majority of syntactic and phonological processes occur at a local domain, there are several processes that appear to apply at a distance, posing a challenge for theories of linguistic structure. This article addresses one of the most common nonadjacent phenomena in phonology: transparent vowels in vowel harmony. Vowel harmony occurs when adjacent vowels are required to share the same phonological feature value (e.g. V+f C V+f). However, transparent vowels create a second-order nonadjacent pattern because agreement between two vowels can ‘skip’ the transparent neutral vowel in addition to consonants (e.g. V+f C VlF C V+f). Adults are shown to display initial learning biases against second-order nonadjacency in experiments that use an artificial grammar learning paradigm. Experiments 1-3 show that adult learners fail to learn the second-order long-distance dependency created by the transparent vowel (as compared to a control condition). In experiments 4-5, training in terms of overall exposure as well as the frequency of relevant transparent items was increased. With adequate exposure, learners reliably generalize to novel words containing transparent vowels. The experiments suggest that learners are sensitive to the structure of phonological representations, even when learning occurs at a relatively rapid pace.

Keywords

nonadjacent dependenciesphonologyartificial grammar learningvowel harmonytransparent vowels

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 91 , Issue 1 , March 2015, pp. 48 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This article would not have been possible without the helpful discussion, advice, and suggestions from the following people: Ariel Goldberg, Matt Goldrick, Iris Berent, Colin Wilson, Paul Smolensky, Neil Bardhan, Patricia Reeder, Anna States, Lily Schieber, Carrie Miller, Emily Kasman, Elissa Newport, Michael Tanenhaus, helpful and anonymous referees, and members of the Aslin-Newport and the M-Tan labs at the University of Rochester. Portions of this work were presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, the UCLA Department of Linguistics, and the E. G. G. Summer School in Poznań, Poland, 2009. Funding was provided by NIH grants DC00167 and T32DC000035. All errors are my own.

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