A word often expresses many different morphological functions. Which part of a word contributes to which part of the overall meaning is not always clear, which raises the question as to how such functions are learned. While linguistic studies tacitly assume the co-occurrence of cues and outcomes to suffice in learning these functions (Baer-Henney,…

While most animals have communication systems, few exhibit such high-level of complexity as human languages. One central question of linguistics and cognitive science is to explore what human cognitive underpinnings and learning mechanisms are necessary to master such a complex system. One influential approach is Chomskyan generativism which…

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…

Despite OT's success, opaque alternations prove difficult to capture with constraints, and some violate the theory's formal restrictions. Here, I propose a novel account of opacity drawing upon developments in psychology. Rather than one grammar, I propose a dual-system model with implicit and explicit mechanisms, a domain-specific OT-like system…

Understanding how native speakers acquire the phonological patterns in their language is a key task for the field of phonology. Numerous studies have suggested that phonological learning is a biased process: certain phonological patterns are easily accessed and learned by the speakers, while others show acquisition difficulties. These differences…

Extracting the regularities of our environment is one of our core cognitive abilities. To study the fine-grained dynamics of the extraction of embedded regularities, a method combining the advantages of the artificial language paradigm (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, [Saffran, J. R., 1996]) and the serial response time task (Nissen & Bullemer,…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…

This dissertation begins with the observation of a typological asymmetry within phonological patterns related to phonetic naturalness. Patterns that are rooted within existing tendencies of perception and/or production--in other words, patterns that are phonetically "natural"--are common in phonological typology and seen in a variety of…

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…