ITRW on Experimental Linguistics Athens, Greece August 28-30, 2006

On Learnability and Naturalness as Constraints on Phonological Grammar

Hahn Koo, Jennifer Cole

Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA

We report six experiments on learnability of four non-adjacent phonotactic constraints which differ in their attested frequency and phonetic conditioning factors; liquid harmony, liquid disharmony, backness harmony, and backness disharmony. Our results suggest that such phonotactic constraints can be implicitly learned from brief experience and that learnability of a phonological grammar may be independent of its attested frequency and phonetic basis.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Koo, Hahn / Cole, Jennifer (2006): "On learnability and naturalness as constraints on phonological grammar", In ExLing-2006, 165-168.