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Title:
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Formal and Cognitive Restrictions on Vowel Harmony
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Author:
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Sara Finley
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://mind.cog.jhu.edu/grad-students/finley
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Degree Awarded:
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Johns Hopkins University
, Department of Cognitive Science
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Degree Date:
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2008
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Computational Linguistics
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
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Director(s):
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William Badecker
Paul Smolensky
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Abstract:
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Vowel harmony, a phonological process whereby adjacent vowels share values
of a phonological feature, has raised important challenges for generative
phonology, particularly Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky,
1993/2004), a theory of linguistic typology in which output forms are
computed in parallel from an infinite candidate set. The parallel nature of
computations in OT, as well as the unconstrained candidate set for possible
outputs poses challenges for a theory of vowel harmony, which applies in a
local fashion, such that vowels share the same feature value as their
nearest neighbor. Particularly, standard theories of vowel harmony in OT
predict the existence of pathological vowel harmony processes that are
unconstrained by locality, producing patterns that are never found in
natural language. Building on the work of Turbidity Theory (Goldrick,
2001), this dissertation proposes Turbid Spreading, a theory of
representations for harmony that provides a solution to the 'myopia'
generalization in OT. Representations for features are both rich as well as
constrained, making it possible to account for several aspects of vowel
harmony (e.g., non-participating vowels and epenthetic vowels) without
over-predicting. Evidence for the completeness of the predicted typology is
provided using computational methods (i.e., finite-state machines). The
cognitive bases for the typological restrictions on vowel harmony typology
are verified in a series of 12 experiments using the artificial grammar
learning paradigm in adults. In these experiments, English speakers are
exposed to mini versions of vowel harmony languages, followed by a
forced-choice comprehension test. This test contains novel items as well as
items from the training set. In particular, several novel test items
include novel representations (e.g., novel vowels), which have been
specifically held out from training to test. This 'poverty of the stimulus'
method (Wilson, 2006) makes it possible to test learners' bi inferences
towards ambiguous stimuli. The results of these experiments suggest that
learners' biases conform to the cross-linguistic typology of harmony
languages. Learners are biased to learn harmony patterns that are
frequently occurring and phonetically natural, but biased against rare or
non-existing patterns. These findings support the hypothesis that
typological restrictions are grounded in learning biases.
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