Department of Psychology, Pacific Lutheran University, USA.
Lang Speech. 2021 Dec;64(4):991-1017. doi: 10.1177/0023830920978679. Epub 2020 Dec 11.
The present study explores learning phonological alternations that contain exceptions. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony pattern in which a regular suffix obeyed a vowel harmony rule, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and a non-alternating suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experiment 1 learned the behavior of both suffixes, but correct performance for the non-alternating suffix was higher when the suffix happened to be in harmony with the stem. Participants in Experiment 2 were exposed to the non-alternating affix in harmonic contexts only, and continued to show a bias towards harmony. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with minimal training on disharmonic cases of the non-alternating morpheme. However, participants were less likely to learn the alternating affix without exposure to morphological stem, stem + suffix alternations in Experiment 4, suggesting a bias towards morphophonological alternations in learning vowel harmony patterns.
本研究探讨了学习包含例外情况的语音交替。参与者接触到一种后/圆元音和谐模式，其中一个规则后缀遵循元音和谐规则，根据词干的后/圆语音特征在 /e/ 和 /o/ 之间变化，而一个不交替的后缀则始终为 /o/，无论词干元音的特征如何。实验 1 中的参与者学习了这两个后缀的行为，但当后缀碰巧与词干和谐时，非交替后缀的正确表现更高。实验 2 中的参与者仅在和谐语境中接触非交替词缀，并且继续表现出对和谐的偏向。实验 3 在非交替词素的不和谐情况下进行了与实验 2 相同的最小训练，但参与者不太可能在没有接触词干、词干+后缀交替的情况下学习交替词缀，这表明在学习元音和谐模式时，他们偏向于形态音系交替。
