Department of Linguistics, The University of Hong Kong.
Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Georgetown University, USA.
J Child Lang. 2022 Mar;49(2):397-407. doi: 10.1017/S0305000920000719. Epub 2021 Jun 29.
This article examines whether children alter a variable phonological pattern in an artificial language towards a phonetically-natural form. We address acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern through the use of two artificial languages; one with dominant harmony pattern, and another with dominant non-harmony pattern. Overall, children favor harmony pattern in their production of the languages. In the language where harmony is non-dominant, children's subsequent production entirely reverses the pattern so that harmony predominates. This differs starkly from adults. Our results compare to the regularization found in child learning of morphosyntactic variation, suggesting a role for naturalness in variable phonological learning.
本文考察了儿童是否会将人工语言中的可变音系模式调整为更符合语音自然规律的形式。我们通过使用两种人工语言来研究可变的圆唇和谐模式的习得；一种语言具有主导的和谐模式，另一种语言具有主导的非和谐模式。总体而言，儿童在语言产生中更倾向于和谐模式。在和谐模式不占主导的语言中，儿童的后续产生完全反转了模式，使得和谐模式占主导地位。这与成年人形成鲜明对比。我们的结果与儿童对形态句法变化的正则化学习相吻合，表明自然性在可变音系学习中起着作用。
